Friday, April 12, 2013
Daily Show on the NCAA
I've got a few posts here and there that I'm working on, but this is absolutely beautiful and needs to be shared. We'll go ahead and call this your Clip of the Week, from Aasif Mandvi at the Daily Show.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
My first cooking post (Lamb Pasanda)
Back when I started this blog, I planned to use it as a place to share some of my passions and skills with all of you. I've done a good job with some of those things (sports, current events, economic analysis), a reasonable job on some others (running, music, The Simpsons), and a terrible job on the rest—most notably, cooking. I love to cook, and I do it all the time, but besides a few posts here and there about food and our food supply, I haven't talked about it here at all. That changes today.
Every week or so—or whenever I cook up a meal that I'm particularly proud of—I'll share a recipe up here with all of you, along with some helpful hints as to how you can cook it yourself. No, I'm not going to turn this into some sort of amateur food blog—the world has plenty of those already. But I do feel as though there's a side of me that isn't being reflected here, and I think I should rectify that starting today.
This weekend was Easter weekend, and the weather is just starting to improve around here, so I took the opportunity to fire up the grill and cook one of my all-time favorites, a recipe first discovered by my father, the original grill master in my family. That recipe is for Lamb Pasanda, and it's a true classic—the recipe is a little different from what's described as "traditional pasanda" here on Wikipedia, but believe me, it's awesome. It's also insanely easy to make, especially if you've got a good blender like I was lucky enough to be given for Christmas last year.
If you've never used yogurt in a meat marinade, you are most definitely missing out. The yogurt tenderizes the meat while giving it an awesomely funky flavor, and the charring from the grill takes it all to the next level. Throw in some Indian-inspired spices and the terrific natural flavor of lamb, and this dish is as delicious as it is unique. But enough rambling; let's get to the recipe.
LAMB PASANDA
Serves: 6 or more, depending on the size of lamb leg you buy
Time: about 30 minutes of active prep, 12-24 hours of inactive prep, and 10-20 minutes of cook time
Serve immediately, along with some sort of vegetable (a simple grilled or broiled asparagus is fine) and a grain (like, say, couscous—for this meal I whipped up a quinoa salad with toasted pine nuts, dried cranberries, and a citrus-mint vinaigrette... but that was for a holiday. You don't need to go crazy here...). If you're into wine, the beauty of this dish is that it can pair well with any number of wines. I served it with a Côtes du Rhône this weekend, and that seemed to work well, but I'd think that the meal would've stood up nicely against a Syrah or even a Malbec as well.
I don't know, I'm not a sommelier, I just like to drink wine with my dinner, okay? Maybe next time I'll get around to telling you about my dessert, which was in this case a nice, fresh, Key Lime Pie. Awesome stuff. Happy cooking, all. (And next time, I promise more pictures... I didn't think to take any this time around, so that one standard picture up there of my grill loaded up with meat will have to suffice, but I will take more in the future).
Every week or so—or whenever I cook up a meal that I'm particularly proud of—I'll share a recipe up here with all of you, along with some helpful hints as to how you can cook it yourself. No, I'm not going to turn this into some sort of amateur food blog—the world has plenty of those already. But I do feel as though there's a side of me that isn't being reflected here, and I think I should rectify that starting today.
This weekend was Easter weekend, and the weather is just starting to improve around here, so I took the opportunity to fire up the grill and cook one of my all-time favorites, a recipe first discovered by my father, the original grill master in my family. That recipe is for Lamb Pasanda, and it's a true classic—the recipe is a little different from what's described as "traditional pasanda" here on Wikipedia, but believe me, it's awesome. It's also insanely easy to make, especially if you've got a good blender like I was lucky enough to be given for Christmas last year.
If you've never used yogurt in a meat marinade, you are most definitely missing out. The yogurt tenderizes the meat while giving it an awesomely funky flavor, and the charring from the grill takes it all to the next level. Throw in some Indian-inspired spices and the terrific natural flavor of lamb, and this dish is as delicious as it is unique. But enough rambling; let's get to the recipe.
LAMB PASANDA
Serves: 6 or more, depending on the size of lamb leg you buy
Time: about 30 minutes of active prep, 12-24 hours of inactive prep, and 10-20 minutes of cook time
Ingredients
One 3-pound leg of lamb (boneless), butterflied and trimmed of excess
fat
3 cups plain yogurt, well drained
1 large onion, peeled and quartered
10 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup fresh mint leaves, chopped
One 1-inch piece grated fresh ginger
1-1/2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons black peppercorns
1 stick cinnamon, 1 tablespoon whole cloves, and 4
cardamoms (powdered equivalents can vary... call it 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1.5 or 2 teaspoons of cloves, and 1/2 teaspoon or so of cardamom... rough estimates, of course, and you can switch it up to suit your tastes)
Instructions
Cut the butterflied lamb leg into individual pieces—two-inch cubes is a good target size. Set aside.
To make the marinade, combine all ingredients except the lamb in the container of a food processor or blender, and process until smooth.
Place the lamb and the marinade in a gallon-size Ziploc bag, tossing the pieces a bit so that they are well coated. Refrigerate for a
few hours or overnight (really, aim for overnight), turning occasionally to keep the coating well
distributed.
One hour before cooking time, remove the lamb from the
refrigerator (and maybe remove the individual lamb pieces from the marinade) so that it can come to room temperature. Place the lamb pieces directly onto a hot grill (charcoal is much better than gas for this recipe, especially because this one can get a little messy underneath the grill grates... also, I highly recommend a chimney starter as opposed to lighter fluid, but now I'm just veering off topic. Nevertheless, if you've never used a chimney, start now. It's easy, it's cheap, and it gets your coals very hot, very quickly. Bobby Flay would be proud).
Cooking time will vary
depending on the thickness of each piece, how hot (and how big) your grill is, and where on the grill your pieces are sitting, but it should be roughly 4-6 minutes per side. Resist the temptation to cover your grill. It will cook the meat through more quickly, but you'll sacrifice some of the charring that makes this meal so great.
When the lamb is done, you should have a nice char on each side of the meat, and when you press each piece with your finger, it should be firm but still have some "bounce" to it. Rare meat is much better than dry meat, so err on the side of "too rare", unless you're pregnant, afraid of blood, or both.
I don't know, I'm not a sommelier, I just like to drink wine with my dinner, okay? Maybe next time I'll get around to telling you about my dessert, which was in this case a nice, fresh, Key Lime Pie. Awesome stuff. Happy cooking, all. (And next time, I promise more pictures... I didn't think to take any this time around, so that one standard picture up there of my grill loaded up with meat will have to suffice, but I will take more in the future).
Fun with Opening Day rosters
April has always been one of my favorite months, mostly because it means the end of winter and the beginning of baseball season. Opening Day is something of a personal holiday for me, and so I don't totally mind that we've now stretched it out to last a full three days.
As a Red Sox fan, this year has a bit of a different feel for me, as the Sox purged half their roster last August and have now fully embraced a youth movement for the first time in years. As I mentioned on Twitter on Monday, the Sox' Opening Day lineup this year was their youngest on average since 1998, when Pedro Martinez made his Boston debut, Nomar Garciaparra was a 24-year-old MVP-caliber shortstop, and Manny Ramirez was a young slugger for the defending AL champion Cleveland Indians. Meanwhile, Jackie Bradley Jr., now the team's starting left fielder, was at home eagerly awaiting his 8th birthday. So yeah, it was a long time ago.
At any rate, my little bit of sleuthing with respect to the Sox' lineup led me to check out some other teams' lineups, to see what kinds of trends I might uncover. While this type of stuff might fall under the category of "Things That Interest Me and Only Me", so be it. I'll share it here anyway, just in case you care.
This year's Red Sox, with an average age right around 28.5 years old (remember, this is of the Opening Day starting lineup, not the whole roster), clocks in as the 8th-youngest lineup out of the 30 major league teams. The five youngest Opening Day lineups belonged to the Royals (27.1 years), Astros (27.5), Mariners (27.6), Nationals (27.7), and Indians (28.0), while the five oldest lineups belonged to the Yankees (31.6 years), Phillies (31.2), Rangers (30.7), Blue Jays (30.4), and Tigers (30.3).
The banged-up Yankees blow pretty much everyone else out of the water in terms of age, thanks in large part to the oldest outfield in baseball—at 34.5 years old, only the Cubs (33.5) come anywhere close. While the Yankees are currently fielding a cobbled-together lineup of rookies and retreads, things wouldn't be much different for them even if they were perfectly healthy. Substituting Jeter, A-Rod, Teixeira, and Granderson for Nunez, Nix, Youkilis, and Wells actually increases the team's average age all the way up to 33.2 years old, a figure that would make them the oldest team in baseball by a margin of more than two years. No matter how you slice it, these guys are old.
All told, the average age of an Opening Day starter this year is 29 years, 39 days, yielding an average birthdate of February 23, 1984. The average birthdate for a Yankee, meanwhile, would be September 14, 1981, and for a Royal, March 11, 1986. In other words, I'd be older than average in any one of these lineups, and that's just a little bit depressing.
By position, Designated Hitters (like these guys), Right Fielders (like these guys), and First Basemen (like these guys) are the oldest on average, whereas Center Fielders (like these guys) and Shortstops (like these guys) are the youngest. There are 41 Opening Day starters who were born in the 1970s, 9 born in the 1990s, and about the same number who are younger than 25 (35 of them) as those who are 35 or older (37 of them). There were no Opening Day starters this year who were 40 or older, though Todd Helton and Ichiro came pretty darn close.
Age not doing it for you? You want to know about these guys' names? Fine, I can do that, too. As far as last names, we had 4 Cabreras, 3 Gonzalezes, and 15 other surnames shared by 2 players (also a Barmes and a Barnes, a Beltran and a Beltre, a Brantley and a Brantly, a Braun and a Brown, and a Gomes and a Gomez).
There were 10 guys named Chris, 7 guys named Justin, 7 Matts and a Matthew, 6 guys named Carlos and one named Carl. We had 5 Michaels, 2 Miguels, and 4 Mikes; 5 Joses and 5 Joshes; 5 Jasons and 2 Jaysons; 5 Brandons and a Brendan. We had 4 AJs, a BJ, a CC, a JJ, a JP, and a guy named RA. And finally, in my personal favorite, there were 3 Johns, 2 Jons, a Juan, a Jonathan, a Jonathon, a Johnny, a Jonny, and a Jhonny. Just spell it however you want, guys, it doesn't make it any more unique.
We also had 7 names that showed up as both a first name and a last name—those would be Desmond, Francisco, Gordon, Jay, Martin, Nelson, and Ryan. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on your perspective), none of those gentlemen owned the unique distinction of having the same first and last name. I'm holding out hope for a Desmond Desmond somewhere in the near future, and I'm sure there's somebody out there who will oblige.
Do names and ages have anything at all to do with the overall success of a team? Who knows? The favorites out in Vegas this year include one of the youngest teams (Nationals) and some of the oldest teams (Tigers, Blue Jays), with a lot of muddled confusion in between. Let's just hold this one for later, and revisit it all in October. Sound good?
As a Red Sox fan, this year has a bit of a different feel for me, as the Sox purged half their roster last August and have now fully embraced a youth movement for the first time in years. As I mentioned on Twitter on Monday, the Sox' Opening Day lineup this year was their youngest on average since 1998, when Pedro Martinez made his Boston debut, Nomar Garciaparra was a 24-year-old MVP-caliber shortstop, and Manny Ramirez was a young slugger for the defending AL champion Cleveland Indians. Meanwhile, Jackie Bradley Jr., now the team's starting left fielder, was at home eagerly awaiting his 8th birthday. So yeah, it was a long time ago.
At any rate, my little bit of sleuthing with respect to the Sox' lineup led me to check out some other teams' lineups, to see what kinds of trends I might uncover. While this type of stuff might fall under the category of "Things That Interest Me and Only Me", so be it. I'll share it here anyway, just in case you care.
This year's Red Sox, with an average age right around 28.5 years old (remember, this is of the Opening Day starting lineup, not the whole roster), clocks in as the 8th-youngest lineup out of the 30 major league teams. The five youngest Opening Day lineups belonged to the Royals (27.1 years), Astros (27.5), Mariners (27.6), Nationals (27.7), and Indians (28.0), while the five oldest lineups belonged to the Yankees (31.6 years), Phillies (31.2), Rangers (30.7), Blue Jays (30.4), and Tigers (30.3).
The banged-up Yankees blow pretty much everyone else out of the water in terms of age, thanks in large part to the oldest outfield in baseball—at 34.5 years old, only the Cubs (33.5) come anywhere close. While the Yankees are currently fielding a cobbled-together lineup of rookies and retreads, things wouldn't be much different for them even if they were perfectly healthy. Substituting Jeter, A-Rod, Teixeira, and Granderson for Nunez, Nix, Youkilis, and Wells actually increases the team's average age all the way up to 33.2 years old, a figure that would make them the oldest team in baseball by a margin of more than two years. No matter how you slice it, these guys are old.
All told, the average age of an Opening Day starter this year is 29 years, 39 days, yielding an average birthdate of February 23, 1984. The average birthdate for a Yankee, meanwhile, would be September 14, 1981, and for a Royal, March 11, 1986. In other words, I'd be older than average in any one of these lineups, and that's just a little bit depressing.
By position, Designated Hitters (like these guys), Right Fielders (like these guys), and First Basemen (like these guys) are the oldest on average, whereas Center Fielders (like these guys) and Shortstops (like these guys) are the youngest. There are 41 Opening Day starters who were born in the 1970s, 9 born in the 1990s, and about the same number who are younger than 25 (35 of them) as those who are 35 or older (37 of them). There were no Opening Day starters this year who were 40 or older, though Todd Helton and Ichiro came pretty darn close.
Age not doing it for you? You want to know about these guys' names? Fine, I can do that, too. As far as last names, we had 4 Cabreras, 3 Gonzalezes, and 15 other surnames shared by 2 players (also a Barmes and a Barnes, a Beltran and a Beltre, a Brantley and a Brantly, a Braun and a Brown, and a Gomes and a Gomez).
There were 10 guys named Chris, 7 guys named Justin, 7 Matts and a Matthew, 6 guys named Carlos and one named Carl. We had 5 Michaels, 2 Miguels, and 4 Mikes; 5 Joses and 5 Joshes; 5 Jasons and 2 Jaysons; 5 Brandons and a Brendan. We had 4 AJs, a BJ, a CC, a JJ, a JP, and a guy named RA. And finally, in my personal favorite, there were 3 Johns, 2 Jons, a Juan, a Jonathan, a Jonathon, a Johnny, a Jonny, and a Jhonny. Just spell it however you want, guys, it doesn't make it any more unique.
We also had 7 names that showed up as both a first name and a last name—those would be Desmond, Francisco, Gordon, Jay, Martin, Nelson, and Ryan. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on your perspective), none of those gentlemen owned the unique distinction of having the same first and last name. I'm holding out hope for a Desmond Desmond somewhere in the near future, and I'm sure there's somebody out there who will oblige.
Do names and ages have anything at all to do with the overall success of a team? Who knows? The favorites out in Vegas this year include one of the youngest teams (Nationals) and some of the oldest teams (Tigers, Blue Jays), with a lot of muddled confusion in between. Let's just hold this one for later, and revisit it all in October. Sound good?
Thursday, March 28, 2013
About FGCU (and some bad analysis)
Deadspin has a fairly interesting article up today about Florida Gulf Coast University, this year's surprise entrant into the NCAA Tournament's Sweet Sixteen. Touching on some topics that I've previously discussed in posts here and here, author Jonathan Mahler puts a different spin on this Cinderella story.
Of course, where the author really lost me wasn't in this conclusion, but in his odd insistence that this Cinderella run somehow should have been foreseen by all of us, or that it was somehow inevitable. Mahler writes:
Do these connections alone make me a top-tier athletic talent, or a budding superstar journalist? Of course not. All they do is illustrate what we already know about the world, which is that it can be a pretty small place sometimes. If you play sports for long enough, you're pretty much guaranteed to line up with or against somebody who's pretty talented—and if not, you've probably got a relative who did (hey, come to think of it, my uncle did play hoops against Patrick Ewing in the Boston city championship way back when... maybe I've got more of a future in basketball than I'd realized).
As for FGCU, if they had really figured out a way to somehow magically attract top athletes to their school, they wouldn't have been recruiting kids who "grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers", they'd have been recruiting Austin Rivers himself. This isn't to say that these FGCU kids aren't talented—in fact, they are. I've been amazed by what these guys have done, and it's no fluke. I can't wait to watch them continue their run tomorrow night against Florida (late game, eh, CBS? I see what you did there...), and I hope they take this thing all the way to Atlanta for the Final Four.
But to pretend as though FGCU was some sleeping giant—with tons of top talent that nobody bothered to talk about—obscures the real lessons that we could be learning here. Namely, that a coach and a team playing incredibly well as a unit while having fun and playing with reckless abandon can do some pretty special things on a basketball court (and that the NCAA probably screwed up a bit with this year's seeding of the tournament). Not to mention, this isn't exactly a unique story in recent years—George Mason, VCU, and Butler all preceded (and exceeded) FGCU in this regard. Sure, FGCU reaching the Final Four would be unbelievable, and I'm certainly rooting for it, but we're not there yet.
When a big sports story like this one comes along, a lot of bad journalism is bound to be written, so this particular article is hardly a surprise. I just wish that, for once, we could all just enjoy an awesome story on its own merits, without having to draw some bigger (nonsensical) lesson about it all. Unfortunately, that's just not what we in the internet age like to do.
[Deadspin]
Don’t waste your time wooing Nobel laureates to your faculty or trying to recruit National Merit Scholars to a college they’ve never heard of. Do what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do: Devote your resources to building a first-class Division I basketball program.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but FGCU pulled it off pretty quickly... The Eagles basketball program started in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and had to apply more than once before being accepted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association—at the Division II level. Even after being granted permission to move up to Division I, the team had to wait three years before becoming eligible for postseason play.
Florida Gulf Coast University won its first NCAA tournament game in the school’s second year of eligibility, a mere 16 years after graduating its first student. Harvard won its first tournament game this year, too—371 years after its first commencement...
Just how valuable is a strong showing in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament? As it happens, Butler, whose improbable run to the 2010 Final Four is still the stuff of legend, has studied this very question. Its near-championship run—it lost in the finals to Duke—generated precisely $639,273,881.82 in publicity for the university. That’s to say nothing of the increases in merchandise sales and charitable giving, or the 41 percent surge in applications.Interesting stuff, although as I've pointed out in my previous posts, not all schools are as successful at this game as FGCU has been—many more have thrown untold millions at their athletic departments and had hardly any success at all on the field or as an institution. On balance, it's pretty much a zero-sum game—some win big, but many others lose just as much.
Of course, where the author really lost me wasn't in this conclusion, but in his odd insistence that this Cinderella run somehow should have been foreseen by all of us, or that it was somehow inevitable. Mahler writes:
[Head coach Andy] Enfield hasn’t exactly had to scrounge for talent at FGCU. His team’s point guard, Brett Comer, grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers, a current starter for the New Orleans Hornets and the son of former NBA star Doc Rivers. The father of one of Enfield’s bench players, Filip Cvjeticanin, played alongside Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic on the Yugoslavian national team that won a silver medal in the 1988 Olympics.These are some pretty tenuous links here, my man. I, for example, grew up playing baseball against this guy, in games umpired by this guy, and I coached this guy at a baseball camp when I was in high school. My father, meanwhile, shared a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1983, when I was two years old.
Do these connections alone make me a top-tier athletic talent, or a budding superstar journalist? Of course not. All they do is illustrate what we already know about the world, which is that it can be a pretty small place sometimes. If you play sports for long enough, you're pretty much guaranteed to line up with or against somebody who's pretty talented—and if not, you've probably got a relative who did (hey, come to think of it, my uncle did play hoops against Patrick Ewing in the Boston city championship way back when... maybe I've got more of a future in basketball than I'd realized).
As for FGCU, if they had really figured out a way to somehow magically attract top athletes to their school, they wouldn't have been recruiting kids who "grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers", they'd have been recruiting Austin Rivers himself. This isn't to say that these FGCU kids aren't talented—in fact, they are. I've been amazed by what these guys have done, and it's no fluke. I can't wait to watch them continue their run tomorrow night against Florida (late game, eh, CBS? I see what you did there...), and I hope they take this thing all the way to Atlanta for the Final Four.
But to pretend as though FGCU was some sleeping giant—with tons of top talent that nobody bothered to talk about—obscures the real lessons that we could be learning here. Namely, that a coach and a team playing incredibly well as a unit while having fun and playing with reckless abandon can do some pretty special things on a basketball court (and that the NCAA probably screwed up a bit with this year's seeding of the tournament). Not to mention, this isn't exactly a unique story in recent years—George Mason, VCU, and Butler all preceded (and exceeded) FGCU in this regard. Sure, FGCU reaching the Final Four would be unbelievable, and I'm certainly rooting for it, but we're not there yet.
When a big sports story like this one comes along, a lot of bad journalism is bound to be written, so this particular article is hardly a surprise. I just wish that, for once, we could all just enjoy an awesome story on its own merits, without having to draw some bigger (nonsensical) lesson about it all. Unfortunately, that's just not what we in the internet age like to do.
[Deadspin]
Monday, March 25, 2013
Sergio Garcia is a weird dude
This post will be one of those "quick-hitters" that I mentioned in my welcome-back post earlier today. Just thought I'd put that out there in advance, in case you were wondering (I should also mention that "Clip of the Week" and "Quote of the Week" are being done away with, at least in their traditional formats—if I come across a clip or a quotation that's share-worthy, I'll share it immediately without further comment, rather than waiting for the prescribed time. Okay, good talk.)
Either way, we need to talk about this shot, played yesterday down at Arnold Palmer's tournament at Bay Hill (which Tiger won, which puts him back as the world #1, and all credit goes to Lindsey Vonn, because why not). Sergio Garcia, everybody:
The shot itself is obviously impressive enough, and I give Sergio huge credit for even trying it. But it's the context of the shot that makes it most noteworthy in my eyes. Because after playing this shot, Sergio badly chunked his next shot, made a double-bogey on the hole, and then walked off the course and withdrew from the tournament 2 holes later, with only 6 holes left to play. He cited nagging injury problems, injuries that were apparently exacerbated by the (odd) decision to climb a tree and play the shot this way rather than just taking an unplayable lie. Weird dude, man. Weird dude.
But also, as a long-time golfer and fan of the game, I have to wonder: why was he allowed to climb on top of a golf cart in order to get up into the tree? If you follow the game at all, you'll know that golf is full of all sorts of obscure, bizarre, and outdated rules that generally continue to pretend that golf is being played in the 19th century where electricity and television don't exist, and that there's nothing but a man and a golf course out there, relying on his own honor and that of his playing partners.
If you don't believe me, ask Craig Stadler or Dustin Johnson or this guy or really any of the guys on this brutal list. Or just go back and read this post or this post, some of the first work that I ever produced for this blog. Golf rules are nutso. Period, end of story.
And so, if Craig Stadler can be DQ'd from a tournament for kneeling on a towel, and if golfers can be routinely disqualified for signing scorecards that have the wrong numbers on them, even though TV cameras (and ShotTracker representatives) have followed their every move, to the inch, and therefore everyone in the world knows exactly what everyone's score is... then why is Sergio allowed to receive "assistance" from a golf cart that just happens to be sitting there? Isn't that an unnatural advantage? If he can use the cart to stand on, then why can't he use it to ride around the course from shot to shot (pipe down, Casey Martin)? Why can't we give a guy a ladder or a rake or a scuba suit to help him play his next shot? It's weird, no?
Golf rules baffle me. So does Sergio Garcia. But this shot was still awesome, no matter how you cut it.
Either way, we need to talk about this shot, played yesterday down at Arnold Palmer's tournament at Bay Hill (which Tiger won, which puts him back as the world #1, and all credit goes to Lindsey Vonn, because why not). Sergio Garcia, everybody:
The shot itself is obviously impressive enough, and I give Sergio huge credit for even trying it. But it's the context of the shot that makes it most noteworthy in my eyes. Because after playing this shot, Sergio badly chunked his next shot, made a double-bogey on the hole, and then walked off the course and withdrew from the tournament 2 holes later, with only 6 holes left to play. He cited nagging injury problems, injuries that were apparently exacerbated by the (odd) decision to climb a tree and play the shot this way rather than just taking an unplayable lie. Weird dude, man. Weird dude.
But also, as a long-time golfer and fan of the game, I have to wonder: why was he allowed to climb on top of a golf cart in order to get up into the tree? If you follow the game at all, you'll know that golf is full of all sorts of obscure, bizarre, and outdated rules that generally continue to pretend that golf is being played in the 19th century where electricity and television don't exist, and that there's nothing but a man and a golf course out there, relying on his own honor and that of his playing partners.
If you don't believe me, ask Craig Stadler or Dustin Johnson or this guy or really any of the guys on this brutal list. Or just go back and read this post or this post, some of the first work that I ever produced for this blog. Golf rules are nutso. Period, end of story.
And so, if Craig Stadler can be DQ'd from a tournament for kneeling on a towel, and if golfers can be routinely disqualified for signing scorecards that have the wrong numbers on them, even though TV cameras (and ShotTracker representatives) have followed their every move, to the inch, and therefore everyone in the world knows exactly what everyone's score is... then why is Sergio allowed to receive "assistance" from a golf cart that just happens to be sitting there? Isn't that an unnatural advantage? If he can use the cart to stand on, then why can't he use it to ride around the course from shot to shot (pipe down, Casey Martin)? Why can't we give a guy a ladder or a rake or a scuba suit to help him play his next shot? It's weird, no?
Golf rules baffle me. So does Sergio Garcia. But this shot was still awesome, no matter how you cut it.
On the importance of Excel
Four years ago, when global markets were going completely haywire, one of the more important events that helped "turn things around" was FASB's relaxation of mark-to-market accounting standards, a decision that allowed banks to value many of their "distressed" assets based on, basically, whatever their internal models said they were worth. We can argue all day about the long-term costs and benefits of this decision (as you might imagine, I'm pretty aggressively negative on the decision), but ultimately the short-term impact was to place a significant amount of the world's financial stability on the shoulders of one computer program—Microsoft Excel.
We'll turn things over to Baseline Scenario's James Kwak for some more color on the topic (all emphasis mine):
If a mortgage officer at a small regional bank made a similar mistake—say, inadvertently doubling the annual income number for a loan applicant, and then approving said applicant for a number of low-interest loans—that officer would undoubtedly be fired at the end of the day. But here, at JPMorgan, we have a guy who made a similar error on a much larger scale, with much riskier assets and a whole lot more money on the line, and the whole world shrugs its shoulders and goes on about its business. That's scary.
What are some of the other bank models out there telling us about banks' risk profiles and the strength of their capital bases? Should we expect those models to be any better than this one? I suspect not, and I think the (over)reliance on Excel will likely lead us to some very negative outcomes down the line. Of course, as I've said before, this doesn't mean that we should blame the model if and when things go horribly wrong—models, at the end of the day, are only as good as the people who write (and monitor) them. Instead, we need to start blaming the people who write and implement these models, and then holding them accountable for their errors.
[Baseline Scenario]
We'll turn things over to Baseline Scenario's James Kwak for some more color on the topic (all emphasis mine):
I spent the past two days at a financial regulation conference in Washington... In his remarks on the final panel, Frank Partnoy mentioned something I missed when it came out a few weeks ago: the role of Microsoft Excel in the “London Whale” trading debacle (note: read more about it here)...
To summarize: JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office needed a new value-at-risk (VaR) model for the synthetic credit portfolio (the one that blew up) and assigned a quantitative whiz (“a London-based quantitative expert, mathematician and model developer” who previously worked at a company that built analytical models) to create it. The new model “operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.”
The internal Model Review Group identified this problem as well as a few others, but approved the model, while saying that it should be automated and another significant flaw should be fixed. After the London Whale trade blew up, the Model Review Group discovered that the model had not been automated and found several other errors. Most spectacularly,
“After subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended. This error likely had the effect of muting volatility by a factor of two and of lowering the VaR ...”
Microsoft Excel is one of the greatest, most powerful, most important software applications of all time... it provides enormous capacity to do quantitative analysis, letting you do anything from statistical analyses of databases with hundreds of thousands of records to complex estimation tools with user-friendly front ends. And unlike traditional statistical programs, it provides an intuitive interface that lets you see what happens to the data as you manipulate them.
As a consequence, Excel is everywhere you look in the business world—especially in areas where people are adding up numbers a lot, like marketing, business development, sales, and, yes, finance...
But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way.
This is why the JPMorgan VaR model is the rule, not the exception: manual data entry, manual copy-and-paste, and formula errors. This is another important reason why you should pause whenever you hear that banks’ quantitative experts are smarter than Einstein, or that sophisticated risk management technology can protect banks from blowing up. At the end of the day, it’s all software. While all software breaks occasionally, Excel spreadsheets break all the time. But they don’t tell you when they break: they just give you the wrong number.Yikes. As Kwak later points out, this is likely a systematic problem, and not just an unfortunate one-time mistake. If the modeler's error had served to increase the amount of risk at the end of the day, then the mistake no doubt would have been caught, since it would have affected the bank's bottom line. But because senior executives and traders were explicitly hoping for a model that underestimated the risk profile of their portfolios, the "mistake" here went unnoticed and uncorrected, which is so absurd that it's almost comical.
If a mortgage officer at a small regional bank made a similar mistake—say, inadvertently doubling the annual income number for a loan applicant, and then approving said applicant for a number of low-interest loans—that officer would undoubtedly be fired at the end of the day. But here, at JPMorgan, we have a guy who made a similar error on a much larger scale, with much riskier assets and a whole lot more money on the line, and the whole world shrugs its shoulders and goes on about its business. That's scary.
What are some of the other bank models out there telling us about banks' risk profiles and the strength of their capital bases? Should we expect those models to be any better than this one? I suspect not, and I think the (over)reliance on Excel will likely lead us to some very negative outcomes down the line. Of course, as I've said before, this doesn't mean that we should blame the model if and when things go horribly wrong—models, at the end of the day, are only as good as the people who write (and monitor) them. Instead, we need to start blaming the people who write and implement these models, and then holding them accountable for their errors.
[Baseline Scenario]
Getting back at it
Hey, folks. As you may have noticed (and I certainly hope you have), it's been quite a while since my last post up here. I've been busy with work and family obligations, and I've also been battling a variety of annoying little illnesses that have sapped my usual energy (come on, winter, cut the crap). But most of all, I just felt like I really needed a break from blogging.
In recent months, I haven't felt as though my posts have been of the caliber that I expect from myself, and too often I was throwing something up here just to say that I had produced something, out of a sense of duty. As a result, I kept pounding away at a lot of the same story lines, and the good, in-depth, original content that I take pride in creating (stuff like this and this and this and this) was becoming ever more scarce. This blog deserves better than that, and so I took a bit of a hiatus to recharge my batteries and reconsider the future direction of the Crimson Cavalier.
To answer the first obvious question: no, the Crimson Cavalier is not dead. Not hardly. But I will be posting less frequently than I used to—instead of 1-2 posts daily, expect more like 3-5 posts weekly, with a few quick-hitters (with minimal added analysis) sprinkled in along the way. As a trade-off, though, at least once a week, I intend to write a longer-form post about a topic that I think is interesting and important. Yes, some of these topics—like 3-D printing, say, or public debt dynamics—will be familiar, but I'll try not to beat any of them into the ground unless the news flow commands that I do so. Ultimately, expect more quality than quantity, with the same point of view that you've come to expect from me.
Somewhat ironically, this blog hiatus coincided with a very big moment for the blog, as I started coming across some of my own original content on other people's blogs. Last year, you may remember me welcoming March Madness with a mock-up of Simpsons characters to represent the various Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) teams (an amendment by me of an idea that I'd seen elsewhere). I was pretty proud of my Photoshop work at the time, and now it seems like the Simpsonization of collegiate athletics has become a bit of an internet meme.
I first found my work posted, quite by accident, by a friend of mine on Facebook. I laughed and thought it was an isolated incident, but then, later that week, I found this blog post on SB Nation, with my ACC work buried amidst the other conferences. It was a very strange moment for me, as my heart swelled with something approximating pride. In my own humble opinion, I think my fitting of the characters to the schools is better than most efforts on there, but I digress—I have to say that the SEC one is a particularly awesome piece of work.
Either way, hooray for the Crimson Cavalier! I'm semi-internet-famous now. Now, with my batteries re-charged, I hope I can get back to doing what I do best. I hope you'll all still be here to witness it.
In recent months, I haven't felt as though my posts have been of the caliber that I expect from myself, and too often I was throwing something up here just to say that I had produced something, out of a sense of duty. As a result, I kept pounding away at a lot of the same story lines, and the good, in-depth, original content that I take pride in creating (stuff like this and this and this and this) was becoming ever more scarce. This blog deserves better than that, and so I took a bit of a hiatus to recharge my batteries and reconsider the future direction of the Crimson Cavalier.
To answer the first obvious question: no, the Crimson Cavalier is not dead. Not hardly. But I will be posting less frequently than I used to—instead of 1-2 posts daily, expect more like 3-5 posts weekly, with a few quick-hitters (with minimal added analysis) sprinkled in along the way. As a trade-off, though, at least once a week, I intend to write a longer-form post about a topic that I think is interesting and important. Yes, some of these topics—like 3-D printing, say, or public debt dynamics—will be familiar, but I'll try not to beat any of them into the ground unless the news flow commands that I do so. Ultimately, expect more quality than quantity, with the same point of view that you've come to expect from me.
Somewhat ironically, this blog hiatus coincided with a very big moment for the blog, as I started coming across some of my own original content on other people's blogs. Last year, you may remember me welcoming March Madness with a mock-up of Simpsons characters to represent the various Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) teams (an amendment by me of an idea that I'd seen elsewhere). I was pretty proud of my Photoshop work at the time, and now it seems like the Simpsonization of collegiate athletics has become a bit of an internet meme.
I first found my work posted, quite by accident, by a friend of mine on Facebook. I laughed and thought it was an isolated incident, but then, later that week, I found this blog post on SB Nation, with my ACC work buried amidst the other conferences. It was a very strange moment for me, as my heart swelled with something approximating pride. In my own humble opinion, I think my fitting of the characters to the schools is better than most efforts on there, but I digress—I have to say that the SEC one is a particularly awesome piece of work.
Either way, hooray for the Crimson Cavalier! I'm semi-internet-famous now. Now, with my batteries re-charged, I hope I can get back to doing what I do best. I hope you'll all still be here to witness it.
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