Book Log 2009 #4: The Pope's Children by David McWilliams

In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Ireland, a notable moment for a small and very Catholic country, and it is the generation born in and around that visit - some 620,000 people - that McWilliams tags as the drivers of Ireland's economic boom, facilitated by Ireland's membership in the European Monetary Union, which gave the Irish easier access to low-interest German loans.

The book apparently goes on to talk about this generation's creativity and how they're reshaping the country, but as I quit after about 100 pages I can't vouch for that. While most reviews praise the book for its readability I had a very hard time getting even 100 pages in. The basic ideas and facts are repeated mercilessly, which while effective (I don't think I'll ever forget that 620,000 figure) is pretty irritating.

I'll admit to also being put off a bit in the way McWilliams describes this generation's behavior and tasts as it sounds like the Irish are becoming, well, Americans. And really, if I want to read about Lexus-driving GenX/Y assholes, I can pick up Boston magazine.

I'll admit I wasn't paying a lot of attention to when they formally named the government bailout TARP (for Troubled Assets Relief Program), but the name now has me thinking. If we'd taken the $700 billion and bought actual tarps - like this one - we could make one big tarp that would be 358,700,642,791,551 square miles in area. That much tarp could cover the Earth, which has a surface area of 196,935,000 square miles, 1,821,416 times. Or a little less when you consider you're wrapping a sphere with a huge square tarp. There's bound to be some waste.

As much as I'd like to avoid a depression, there's part of me that wishes we'd bought the big ass tarp.

(It should go without saying that someone should check my math.)

UPDATE! I went back and checked my own math, and found that I'd gotten it horrifically wrong. What I wound up calculating was the area for a tarp that would have 1 billion of those tarps per side, rather than one big tarp made up of a billion of these smaller tarps.

So I went back and did the math on making a tarp out of a billion of these tarps (actually about 50,000 fewer, in order to keep it a square). Said tarp would have a side of 3, 162, 200 feet, which results in an area of... 358,681.21 square miles. That would cover Texas with room to spare, which I'm sure would please a few people.

Book Log 2009 #2 and #3: The Black Tower and Mr. Timothy by Louis Bayard

I was kind of on the fence about The Black Tower, which revisits the mystery around France's Lost Dauphin, mostly due to relative indifference about French history. Thankfully, the book avoids most of the court intrigue you might expect and gives plenty of time to the main character, a struggling young doctor, and the criminal turned detective Vidocq (creating a good riff on the Holmes and Watson dynamic). There's also a bit of family drama, as the young doctor learns more about his father, a doctor turned lens grinder.

The father and son relationship is also a significant feature of Mr. Timothy, which follows a now grown-up Timothy Crachit, who is living in a house of ill repute in exchange for providing certain services to the madam (just not the ones you might expect). He struggles with the strained bonds of his family (parents and several siblings dead, and in infrequent contact with those still living), and chafes at the continued reliance on "Uncle N" for financial support. The discovery of two young girls, dead and branded with the letter G, sets him on a quest to figure out what happened to them.

Both books are filled with lavish period detail and characters strong enough not to be smothered by it. Mr. Timothy is a bit less action-oriented than The Black Tower, but makes up for it with peeks into the lives and history of the Crachit family. Both are well recommended.

Based on the number of entries, most of you may not remember that I put together an election prediction contest (or perhaps most of you do, and I just have a much smaller readership than the handful I assume still read this thing). It seems like it would be gauche to have the results announced after next week's inauguration, so here they are!

The contest had five parts:

Part I: Pick the winners by state. There were 104 possible points here, as I threw in Guam's straw poll to get the contest to a 200 point theoretical maximum. Two of us managed to get 101 points: myself and Brian Hight. The odd number comes from Nebraska's split, as I awarded half credit to all of us who predicted McCain's win but not the split (the wife got full marks for picking the split, but then got half credit for picking a split in Maine, too).

Part II: Pick the percentages. Here you got 10 points each if you correctly predicted the popular vote percentages for Obama and McCain, losing a point for every quarter-point off one was. Kudos here to the wife, who got 17 of a possible 20 points.

Part III: Pick the Senate winners. Ten races, two points each. In order to score this I've assumed that Franken will remain the winner in Minnesota, and I gave credit for Georgia where people picked Chambliss and those who went with "other" to represent the run-off. Taking all that into account, Craig Barker ran the table and picked up all 20 points.

Part IV: Pick the next five finishers in order. This gave the minor candidates some love, with each candidate in proper order giving 5 points, those one position off giving 3, and two positions off giving 1. The wife earned all 25 points here, correctly getting the order of Nader, Barr, Baldwin, McKinney and Keyes.

Part V: Yea or Nay? Seven yea-or-nay questions, three points each. They were:

Would Santa Claus get 100 votes in West Virginia? A guy in Nevada who legally changed his name to Santa Claus was a registered write-in candidate in West Virginia, meaning that any votes for him would be reported under his name. Not surprising for a state full of coal, he only garnered 59 votes.

Would the Democrats get a 60 seat majority in the Senate? A nay for this admittedly unlikely possibility.

Would the Democrats get at least 250 seats in the House? Aye, they did.

Would any location be decided by fewer than 1000 votes? Nay, nowhere was even close to that number (though Missouri's 3903 is pretty tight).

Would the Democrats win more gubernatorial races than the GOP? Aye, they did, 7-4.

Would McCain or Obama get at least 75 percent of the vote in any state? Limited to state given the expected big win for Obama in DC, the closest we got was the President-Elect's 71.85 percent in Hawaii. Nay.

Would Obama win Dixville Notch, New Hampshire? The traditional first in the nation voting location went with Obama, 15-6, so aye.

Our wacky prop bet winner was the Left Reverend Erik Corley, sweeping the field for the full 21 points.

Entrants were also allowed to "ballot stuff" five races out a select group of state Presidential and Senate races. I don't think everyone realized that there were Senate races in play, as more than one entrant didn't use all of their stuffing opportunities. Brian was the only entrant to get the 10 extra points.

So when the smoke-filled room cleared, what were the final totals?

Coen, S. 170
Hight 167
Coen, M. 164
Barker 158
Corley 154
Sorenson 115

So kudos to the wife, whose success later in the contest made up for her McCain-friendly state picking. It should be noted that Greg's score is the result of an incomplete entry. I'm sure he'd have done much better if he'd bothered to try.

Thanks to all who played, and see you in 2012!

Baby update!

We had our level II ultrasound last week, and it apparently went well. At least we're taking the doctor's word for it, as even at the higher level of resolution it was hard to tell which greyish blob was what body part (aside from the limbs, at least). We did get some decent profile shots of the head, though there's not much more you can say about it than (a) the baby does, indeed, have a head, and (b) it has the appropriate features in the appropriate places.

We did get to see the heart pumping away, which was pretty cool.

So while we're still at a higher risk for certain things, our low starting risk, coupled with the scan, suggests that our overall risk is still pretty low. I will say I don't think we were ever frantic about potential issues, between the assurances from our doctor and our short visit with the Crowley family, which gave us some frame of reference (and as an aside, Salome, you have my permission to get on your soap box in the comments as you see fit).

Coming back from the appointment we noticed that there was a police car blocking Huntington Avenue, which we thought was odd until we got to my office and heard about this. The ladder involved operates out of a station that abuts campus, and I can see the station house from my office. It's a sad enough story on its own, and it's looking to fester into something else between additional brake problems on fire equipment and the firefighters' union stepping in to ask the state police to inspect their trucks. More fun ahead, I'm sure.

But back to baby. Not much else to report other than the ultrasound. We still have no boy name (I don't think Zach Wamp is legally binding; sorry, Tennessee!), and we've not yet sucked it up and gone to Babies R Us to register for stuff. We've never liked that chain due to the very unusual way it is organized, and we've assumed that it becomes more intuitive once you are pregnant or have kids. Should we ever work up the courage to go back in we'll let you know if that's the case.

Book Log 2009 #1: Sun in a Bottle by Charles Seife

This chronicle of the quest to harness nuclear fusion for energy does an admirable job in both giving the history of man-made fusion - starting with the hydrogren bomb and going through recent "discoveries" like cold fusion and bubble fusion - and in talking about the science in a way that's both understandable and reasonably technical.

That being said, I did want a little bit more about hot fusion, tokamaks, etc. and perhaps less on cold and bubble fusions, even though both help to illustrate his point that a future with cheap, abundant and clean fusion energy is wishful thinking. Still, it's worth a look if this sort of thing interests you.

According to today's Sagarin rankings, UNC is ranked fourth in men's college basketball, while Harvard is 205th. The link to these two lies at number 58, which leads me to wonder what the greatest ranking difference is between a win against a highly-ranked team followed by a loss to a lowly-ranked team. Virginia losing to Chaminade in 1982 jumps to mind, though techincally I don't know if it'd count given that Chaminade isn't in division I.

This is probably something I could brute force, at least for the last few years, by looking at past seasons on ESPN, though I don't think there's any sort of Sagarin archive (not that I'm wedded to using his rankings, but it add to the fun when you can point to a 201 position difference between teams).

One unfortunate trend here over the last few months is the lack of posts that aren't college football or book related. There are a variety of reasons for this, most of which fall back on personal motivation to think of or find interesting things to write about.

I am happy to say, though, that this will not be a problem in 2009, or for many years after that, as the wife and I are expecting our first child in May. Feel free to celebrate or recoil in horror as you see fit.

Things have progressed relatively normally since we got official/medical confirmation that the oven was enbunned, as our doctor has been very positive about the various tests and examinations we've had to date. The only hiccup came in our last ultrasound, which uncovered an echogenic intracardiac foci, which can serve as a marker for Down's syndrome or other chromasomal disorders in a small number of cases.

We'd done a test in the first trimester to get an estimated risk for Down's and trisomy 18, and both were very low, so while we're likely to be among the vast majority of cases where there's no larger issue, we are getting a level II ultrasound this week just to check things out. Apparently the EIF thing is one of the ways to drive expectant parents crazy during the second trimester.

So, all things being equal, so far so good.

As far as gender goes, we expect the child will have one, but we're opting to not find out until the kid comes out. Doing this does prevent us from using our working titles - Owen for a boy, Rowan for a girl (say the potential full names out loud if you don't get why they're just working titles). So we're going with Little Coen for now, which I fear will stick as a nickname.

For actual names, we're going with Lucy Catherine if we have a girl. If it's a boy... we'll get back to you.

The wife is coping pretty well with things. She's past the nausea, thankfully, but she's traded that in for more frequent trips to the bathroom (a trade I think she'd make any day of the week). She's also achier than normal, and is finding it more difficult to find a comfortable sleeping position. She's also finding her work clothes are beginning to not fit, which she'd find more problematic if it didn't give her a reason to go shopping.

We're starting to evaluate the logistical end of things as well. We know what room we'll use as a nursery, but have yet to really get our heads around the quantity and variety of things we'll need to get to properly care for the kid. More on the joys and frustrations of buying furniture, clothing, and other miscellany as we go forward.

Part of me is still not quite realizing that this is, in fact, happening. There's another part that's more or less terrified. But then there's the third part that's looking forward to greeting a new person into our family, and I'm happy to say that's the part that's winning out.

The Blogalicious College Football Games of the Week

Monday - Texas v. Ohio State (at Glendale, Arizona). While everyone expects a whitewashing here, it should be noted that Ohio State has actually done pretty well recently when they've been playing in bowl games that don't decide the national title. Prior to their back-to-back BCS blowouts, they won four straight bowl games, three of which were, as this game, the Fiesta Bowl. That being said, this is also What Could Have Been, Part III, as Texas is going to do its best to show that they were snubbed and to get back some of the spotlight that Utah gained by winning the Sugar Bowl. So probably still a good beating for the Buckeyes. Score: Texas 57, Ohio State 28

Tuesday - Tulsa v. Ball State (at Mobile, Alabama). This has to be a little bit of a downer for Ball State, given that they went from a potential all-unbeated matchup with Boise State to the GMAC Bowl against Tulsa. Tulsa won last year's GMAC Bowl 63-7 over another MAC team, Bowling Green. Not a good sign. Score: Tulsa 49, Ball State 38

Thursday - Florida v. Oklahoma (at Miami, Florida). You've undoubtedly heard all the stories about how the BCS title game pits the unstoppable force of the Sooner offense versus the immovable object of the Gator defense. But I'd prefer to look ahead to next year, when Sam Bradford and Tim Tebow will match up as the starting QBs of the Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs (I'll leave it to you to decide which QB ends up where). Regardless of the outcome, both will think back to better days, when they were winning Heismans and competing for national titles, rather than focus on the endless haze of sacks, pressures, and picking turf out of one's face mask. Savor the moment, gentlemen. Score: Oklahoma 31, Florida 27

Last Week: 5-5
Season: 75-51