This post presents a good opportunity for me to let you know two important factoids:
If you don’t care to scroll through long emails, or if the email is truncated, you may also read posts on the blog website. Either get there using the bookmark you almost certainly stored upon first visiting my blog (you did, didn’t you?), or click on the title of this post up near the top of the email text and pow, there you go.
Incidents and people in my stories and commentary are only loosely based on reality (except insofar as the “me” or “I” in what look like first-person narratives resembles a wise, modern hero-genius—that part is true). Memory and my compulsion to add 17% more entertainment value to already-questionable tales means that you really shouldn’t believe anything you read here.
My blog has been online for just a couple of weeks, and already the fan mail is rolling in! Actually, it’s more like FAQ mail, for so far it consists of questions, not praise. And if I had to characterize the tone of the questions, I would say it leans a smidge toward the hostile side of the tone-o-meter. But hey, I know that what is simple and obvious to one person may be a big ol’ mystery to others, and dealing with the new or the unknown can be stressful, so I am happy to provide relief by answering any and all queries in a succinct and caring manner. Also, please feel free to leave comments in the comment box that you see under each story; they, too will be met with at least a smile and possibly a personalized response from Yours Truly.
I hope to make this a regular feature, but only, of course, if I continue to receive mail from readers. We’re off to a promising start, with letters from readers on two different continents.
First, out of Africa:
Gee Willikers, Mr. Chris! I subscribe to this blog, and also to your other blog, Column Inches by Chris. I can’t help noticing that the same stories seem to appear in both blogs. Why are you publishing the same stuff in two places? Don’t you think readers will notice? Are you a double-dipper? Hmmm? Huh? Eh? Waddya say to that?
Gotta run. My gombo frais with riz gras is burning.
Sincerely,
Calibrese H. McElhannon, Ivory Coast
Well, Cubby—do you mind if I call you Cubby?—I urge you to wipe the spittle from your chin and then close your mouth for just a minute (try nose-breathing—it’s great) and take a closer look. It is true that the same works may appear on both sites, but surely you have noticed that they appear in different forms and with a different purpose on each blog. This blog is where I post links to my written works, either as they appeared in other publications or in manuscript form. While you may click the links and read the linked material, the main content of this blog is my commentary on my own writings and the adventure that is trying to write for publication. It’s what they call a “value-add” up in the sales and marketing suite, on the theory that my ramblings add value to the written works (before you ask, that’s entertainment value—I’m not going to send you money). This blog is and always will be absolutely free to readers. My other blog, Column Inches by Chris, is where I publish, inline in the posts themselves, works that I offer for publication. The purpose of that site is to attract paying subscribers, whom I envision as mainly comprising publishers, editors, and writers who need material to publish, or as inspiration. Readers in search of entertainment are always welcome too, of course. Since the posts themselves are the product, I do not write commentary on that site.
Yours truly,
Yours Truly
And now, a delightful missive from a landlocked mujer on the South American land mass:
Gee Willikers, Mr. Chris! I subscribe to this blog, and also to your other blog, Column Inches by Chris. I can’t help noticing that after a haphazard start that featured a veritable tsunami of posts at all hours of the day and night, I now receive just one (1) post per day, total, from one or the other of your blogs. The posts from this blog always arrive at 2:09AM Central Time, and the posts from your other blog always arrive at 2:07AM Central Time. Why did the number of posts drop off, and why do the emails arrive at those strange and wondrous times? Hmmmm? Huh? Eh? Not so bold now, are we? Whatsamatter, cat got your tongue?
I gotta go. My asado con huaraches is burning.
Sincerely,
Señora Malaguena Splunt, Paraguay
Well, Cubby—do you mind if I call you Cubby?—I urge you to take several calming breaths and a measured dose of any soothing prescription medications you may possess, or a jolt of electroshock therapy if it is permitted in your jurisdiction, and then rub the sleepy-dust from your ocular orbs, and attend my words.
On the subject of the frequency of posts, I am new to blogging, but I am not new to writing. I have a large backlog of both published and unpublished material. I am also writing new things at a steady pace. Time will tell if I am what they call a “hack writer” (un escritorzuelo to you, Cubby) but the fact is, I could probably publish more than most people would want to read if I just dropped it all on them at once. Even though readers may read my work at their own pace regardless of the publication schedule, I decided to ease up on the publishing throttle to spare my subscribers any semblance of the drinking-from-the-firehose effect. Just as we all need and enjoy a bit of humorous writing, we all need and enjoy water, but that doesn’t mean we want Niagara Falls landing on our heads every day, now does it? (Though if you haven’t experienced The Hurricane Deck at Niagara, where the Falls do in fact land on your head, I highly recommend it—but I wouldn’t build a house on that spot.)
It is true, Cubster, that at first I was posting like a wild man. In those heady first couple of blogging days it was all too easy to mash the “Post” button after completing each post, even if that meant sending out several in one day. Since I also receive the emails from my blog posts, it didn’t take long for me to notice that no other publication to which I subscribe assaults me with more than one contact per day, and that there’s probably a reason for that: don’t exhaust your subscribers. And so I started using the sites’ scheduling feature instead of posting immediately. Rest assured that my full body of work—past, present, and future—will eventually appear in one or both of my blogs. The pace of publication does not imply a shortage of material. In fact, I have several days’ worth of posts written and queued up to come your way, with more being added all the time. I expect to keep publishing one post per day for quite some time.
That was the easy part of your question, Cubbalina mía.
As for the time of day of my posts, to fully understand that you need to know about my history of choosing numbers. I could give many examples, but for brevity’s sake I will limit myself to two.
The first number-choosing incident I will share occurred in June of 1978, when I was seventeen (it was a very good year). I was attending a six-week summer college program for high school students. During the first week, attendees got to sign up to receive a nice sports jersey with the college program name on the front and their own name and a number of their choice on the back. For reasons beyond my ken, there was much guffawing and rib-jabbing with elbows at the table where we handed in our jersey information sheets. A week later the jerseys arrived in a truckload of cardboard boxes (there were 600 students in the program). The distribution of jerseys came to resemble the disbursement of food aid to the starving on the docks of an impoverished nation—much hysteria and crowding, despite the fact that each student was guaranteed to receive the exact jersey intended for him or her. We were instructed to take our jerseys back to our dorm rooms, and to all wear them the next day in a grand show of program spirit.
The next morning, I emerged from my dorm room resplendent in my red jersey (and pants and shoes and socks—this is not one of those stories about some nimrod taking the instructions ultra-literally and wearing only the jersey, though that would be a good one for another day). I hastened to the dining hall, for breakfast was the most substantial meal of the day and I was starving. Jerseys and numbers were not on my mind, but when I reached the dining hall I discovered the reason for all the guffawing the week before. It seems that, unbeknownst to me, most students had seen the jersey number-selection as a chance to express some risqué or otherwise offbeat humor. They had surmised correctly that no one in authority would review the numbers before sending the information sheets off to the jersey manufacturer. And so as each student entered the hall, he or she was implored by the assembled breakfast crowd to turn around and show the back of the jersey so that all could enjoy the numerological wit. And boy, did they laugh, even though most of the wit was so repetitive as to be rendered meaningless—except to teenagers of a certain mindset, for whom the same joke repeated ad infinitum will do just fine.
And so each revelation of another “69” or “420” or “666” was met with shrieks of appreciation that were worthy of Beatlemania. Even the occasional “316” sported by the holier kids was met with loud but respectful applause. Finally, my turn to enter the room arrived. I didn’t know many people outside of my Spanish major, so I was met with cries of, “Turn around, kid!” I was extremely shy at that time, but I was caught up in the high spirits and so I made a dramatic jump and spin and landed with my back facing the room to display…47.
Before my revelation, the crowd had drawn in a mighty anticipatory breath, ready to expel it in another gust of hilarity upon seeing one of the Naughty Numbers again. But my number shocked them into silence. The indrawn breaths had to go somewhere, so I was then bathed in a silent, rather unpleasant breeze from their unamused lungs. I quickly moved to the buffet to get my customary stack of flapjacks and a glass of ice-cold milk, and the hilarious number unveiling ceremony continued as more kids, with more crowd-pleasing numbers on their backs, entered the room one by one.
That was two weeks into a six-week program. In the remaining four weeks, there were several campus-wide events at which wearing of the jerseys was strongly urged, if not mandatory. And so it was inevitable that my meaningless number featured in another incident at the summer program. Around the fifth week, the math majors put on Casino Night in the student center. We were not allowed to play with real money, of course, but each student was given a stack of chips worth a fictional one thousand dollars. You might find it odd for students to be putting on a casino night in a state where gambling was illegal, but this was explained as a harmless real-world demonstration of mathematics, since games of chance do involve numbers in the play of the game and in the calculation of odds. I knew nothing about gambling and less about math, so at first I just wandered around and lost a few chips at the blackjack and craps tables and figured I would try every game until my chips ran out.
Then I came to the roulette wheel. I lost a chip on a spin but then, enjoying that game more than others, I hung around and watched it for a while. Everyone else was dashing from table to table and rapidly losing their chips, just as I had originally intended to do. After watching roulette for fifteen minutes, I realized that the winning numbers were not as randomly distributed as you would expect. There were a few repeat winning numbers, but not so many that a casual observer would notice. But I was more than casual. As Jane Goodall was to her chosen colony of chimpanzees, so I was to that roulette wheel. I gave it intense, unblinking study; I would know its ways. I eventually figured out that numbers in one quadrant of the wheel were coming up more often than those in other quadrants. Very often, in fact. In my paltry store of gambling knowledge was the fact that the house (that is, the casino or, in this case, the math department) has a built-in edge in every game. I later learned that part of that edge arises from the fact that most players do not bet expertly enough to exploit varying odds. Roulette is resistant to betting systems of any kind, for it is a truly random game where the odds do not change from one spin to the next.
Assuming, that is, the wheel is truly random. This wheel, I realized, was not showing true randomness. It didn’t take an expert gambler or a math genius to realize the implications. Imagine you had never heard of gambling or math, and you observed free money falling from the sky onto a certain spot. Might you not, even hampered by your ignorance of causes and probabilities, go stand near that spot? Just in case?
And so, just in case, I started placing one-chip bets in the squares corresponding to numbers in the quadrant that kept catching the ball. I lost more often than I won, of course, but after hitting a few exact numbers and receiving my 36-to-1 payouts, I increased my bets. I eventually amassed an impressive number of chips—so many that I had to untuck my red #47 jersey (Casino Night being one of the events at which spirit wear was requested) to carry them to the window. I could have kept playing and winning, but frankly, with the predictable wheel, it got boring after a while. Since we weren’t playing for actual money, I received a bogus math department “check” for my winnings, which amounted to three hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars. Not having observed the action at other tables, and not being conversant with gambling in general, I had no idea whether that was good or bad. I just shoved the check into my pants pocket and went over to see if there were any free snacks left.
At the end of the night, when everyone had cashed in their chips, there was a ceremony where the organizers announced the top money-winners. As they worked up from fifth place toward first, I was surprised to hear fairly small dollar amounts called out. And so by the time they got to the first place announcement, I was already moving toward the presenter. When my dollar total and my name were called out and general cries of “Who the heck is that?” and “Chris Who?” went up, I stepped forward to receive my certificate and a handshake, and then the cries changed to “It’s the number 47 guy!” And then, like a suspected card-counter in Vegas being hustled into a back room to receive a warning and/or a beating from the goons, I was dragged over to explain my “system” to the head of the math department. They seemed to think that my so-called “meaningless” #47 indicated that I had some savant-like way with numbers, or special gambling skills that I had deployed unfairly against their innocent games of chance. Even though each student could attend this summer program only once, I envisioned myself receiving the first-ever lifetime ban from future Math Department Casino Nights.
I explained that their toy plastic roulette wheel must be warped or else the table was not absolutely level, or both, but that for whatever reason, it was not yielding random results. I had merely wagered based on careful observation. This sent them off to stand over the wheel with pads of paper and calculators poised to conduct the kind of observation that I had lucked into from my chimp-blind, but I was free to leave with my ill-gotten nonnegotiable check. I know they considered it ill-gotten, for at one point in the interrogation one of them asked me why I had not reported my suspicion that the wheel was not random. From this I learned that those folks might know a thing or two about math, but they knew nothing about human nature, or money.
I wish I had known more about casino operations at that time, for it would have been gratifying for me to turn it around on them and say that they should have had a pretend pit boss keeping an eye on the action in their pretend casino, or that the pretend dealer was massively unobservant (and him a math major; for shame!) if he had not realized that someone (ol’ #47) was raking in an alarming number of unlikely payouts of pretend money, or that I would be writing a letter to the pretend state gaming commission. I also did not know at that time that big winners in real casinos were usually treated to free food and drink and hotel rooms and the attentions of stockinged ladies. What did I get? Hard looks and accusatory questions.
Furthermore, it occurs to me only now that the math teachers squandered a fantastic teachable moment. They could have taught the math majors about the importance of calibrating your instruments and of being alert to statistical anomalies. But what did they teach them instead? How to be snarky stinky-butts when confronted with the unexpected. Not cool, man…not cool at all.
And so I, #47, was a big winner on paper, but a suspected taker of advantage of the math folk and everyone else who played that night. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that I was penalized (at least socially or reputationally, if not financially) for operating based on what I considered to be freely-available information. But that’s another story for another time.
There is an epilogue to that story. Years later, I was to tell the tale to friends and co-workers. Many of them would say, “Hey, 47 is Tom Glavine’s number!” (Tom Glavine was a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves in the 1990s and early 2000s.) “You should have told them that!” Yeah, I should have told those other kids, in 1978, that “47” was a tribute to the then-12-year-old Tom Glavine up there in Billerica, Massachussetts.
There is an epilogue to that epilogue. Other (non-baseball) people, upon hearing my story, would say, “Hey, you should have chosen 42 instead of 47 because 42 is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!” Yeah, I should have done that in 1978, a year before that book was published.
There is an epilogue to that epilogue too. I don’t tell that story any more (except here, where I can tell it in minute detail). It invites too many ignorant questions and suggestions regarding a situation over 40 years in the past, involving a jersey that no longer exists, with a number that I really, truly just chose at random. I don’t recall whether I discarded or donated the jersey after the summer program ended, but given the controversy it tended to cause, I certainly never wore it again. I hope it did not go on to curse anyone else.
What does my misadventure with the number 47 have to do with emails going out at 2:07 and 2:09? Maybe nothing, maybe everything; it is at least a useful reminder that sometimes a number is just a number with no particular meaning. Be alert for meaning, but also be ready to accept that some things are random.
With that lesson aptly illustrated, let’s move on to my second incident involving number selection.
Flash forward from 1978 to 2004. In that year, I had been hired to work in the Publishing Technology Group of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, called PubTech for short. One of my earliest tasks was to write a program and to have it run hourly on our Unix servers. The tool of choice for scheduling jobs on Unix was cron, a well-known program that lets you run programs or scripts on predefined schedules. (Note to anyone who wants to debate what flavor of Unix we actually used at AJC, and the difference between crontab and cron: please don’t; I’m summarizing for a non-technical audience.)
As a new member of the team, I had to submit my work for review by a senior member. My AJC mentor was named Neil. I went to him at the appointed time to review my program and my cron setup. This was my first sit-down with Neil, not counting the time the whole team had gone to Harold’s Bar-B-Q over near the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, so I didn’t know him well. The atmosphere at Harold’s, a pine-paneled interior decorated with all manner of hillbilly and barnyard items, filled with a loud and hungry mixture of prison guards as well as visitors in town to see their incarcerated loved ones, was not conducive to getting-to-know-you chats. The food was messy, you could barely hear over the ruckus, and you were well advised to keep your eye out for violent outbreaks among the clientele.
But back to Neil’s cubicle. I was still somewhat shy in 2004, though not so shy as I had been in 1978. Still, I often found myself running out of small talk around new people. But I had a ready-made ice-breaker for Neil.
After sitting in his guest chair, I waited for him to turn around in his office chair and I says, I says, “My Dad’s name was Neil, too.”
What I didn’t know was that while this Neil was very amiable, he was also somewhat reserved, and possibly more shy around new people than I was. He had no idea how to respond. He surely noticed my use of the word “was,” for my dad had indeed passed away some years before. So how was he to respond? “Sorry for your loss?” “’Tis a fine name, my name, Neil?” “Hug me?” Or would he slowly pull off a rubber mask as they do in Mission: Impossible and reveal himself to be my actual dad? Not likely, but still, I had managed to say the most awkward thing imaginable.
You would think that, as clearly as I remember my failed ice-breaker and the ensuing awkward moment, I would also remember AJC Neil’s response. But I don’t. Maybe we just got down to business, because I’m sure I would remember if there had been hugs or any other Hallmark moments.
And now you have reached The Promised Land, Cubheim Steamroller! The answer to your question is just around the next bend. Don’t quit on me now, boy! I mean girl! Keep going!
Neil reviewed my work and found it acceptable, but he made one suggestion. I had copied some other program’s cron schedule, so my program would run at the top of each hour. Neil suggested that I choose some number of minutes not at the exact top of the hour, so that my program would be less likely to get caught up in the system traffic jam that occurred every hour on the hour because so many people just copied the same cron schedule or otherwise just chose hours without thinking about what else might be happening on the computer.
I said, “You mean like five minutes after each hour?”
Neil said, “No, that’s still pretty common, and still too close to the top of the hour.”
Trying to think randomly, I said, “How about 11 minutes after each hour?”
He said, “Nope. That’s when my jobs are scheduled.” Mine could have run at that time too, but the glint in his eye told me that AJC Neil owned 11 minutes after the hour and I’d best steer clear of it if I didn’t want to get grounded or lose my allowance. Wait—I’m mixing my Neils. AJC Neil politely indicated that he would prefer if I didn’t crowd his 11th minute after each hour with my programs.
And so, after scanning all available cron schedules and seeing which minutes were least used, I chose 7 minutes after each hour for my schedule.
And that, Cubby, is why, all these years later, Column Inches by Chris publishes at 2:07 AM Central Time. I’ll bet every blog-pushing joker in the country that uses a scheduler sets it up to fire off at the top of the hour, smack dab in the height of Computer Rush Hour. I scoff at them from my less-traveled lane.
Oh, and why then does this blog publish at 2:09 AM Central Time instead of also using 2:07? Because I want Column Inches by Chris to go first, unimpeded by this free blog. Commerce before art.
And finally, an admission: it doesn’t really matter. It did matter at the AJC, where our programs were running on a finite number of in-house servers. The Internet, and Substack, and email services all run on many, many servers and the speed of those machines and the capacity of the communication lines is such that my little blog posts are never going to either cause or be impacted by congestion at the top of the hour, in the normal course of events. And if there was some congestion, the computer would rapidly get caught up. And even if you miss a delivery, there’s always the next delivery slot, when good old cron (or whatever they use nowadays) will come around and do his thing.
And so my chosen publication times are neither random nor are they based on a technical requirement. What does that leave? Sentiment, I think. I can imagine eyes rolling at that notion, for I have had a similar reaction to invocations of sentiment in situations where I thought it did not apply.
For instance, in 1994 the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was due to impact the planet Jupiter. The breakup of that comet into fragments, and those fragments’ impending rendezvous with Jupiter, were big science news for a good two years leading up to the event. A few days before the impact, non-scientific commentators started doing their thing, trying to read some poetic meaning or other into orbital mechanics featuring inanimate rocks intersecting with inanimate gas. In particular, I recall rolling my own eyes far, far back into my head when I read one commentator writing about how he was going to stand outside on the night of the impact, looking up into the sky, communing with Jupiter so it would not be alone during this explosive event. Ridiculous. Never mind that for Jupiter, a comet strike would be about as consequential as the smallest imaginable raindrop hitting an elephant. And also never mind that Jupiter is a giant ball of gas and so it does not need anyone to keep it company, either physically and up close or in spirit across great distances.
But sentimentality over memories is different, right? Memories are different from a distant gas giant planet. But how? Memories are some mixture of nerve cells and chemicals and electrical impulses held in a kind of quantum matrix that we don’t yet entirely understand. Uh oh. Memories might be just an insensate natural phenomenon, just like Jupiter. We humans have a brain that houses our memories and allows us to replay them dispassionately, or to relive them and feel like we are having the same experience again, or to convert them into stories and in the process selectively edit them. The editing can consist of adding to or subtracting from the actual memory to conjure something different, perhaps to make it more entertaining as a blog post. That kind of editing is common when writing.
The other kind of editing is a sort of automatic wishful thinking, which is yet another possibly insensate natural phenomenon in the same brain that houses the memory. When thinking about past events, we may close our eyes and imagine traveling into the memory. And we are there, inside this reanimated natural phenomenon that has been sitting patiently in our brain for so long. As with good wishes projected toward Jupiter, our presence inside the memory is undetected by and therefore meaningless to the memory itself. But the present us can not only visit the past us but can also edit the memory so that, for instance, the crowd goes wild over the bewildered boy’s jersey number, or the boy is admired and congratulated for nearly breaking the bank at the casino, or the man does not say the thing about his father’s name to the co-worker.
Or, perhaps, present us could visit and let the past replay exactly as it happened the first time, except this time present us rests a reassuring hand on the troubled shoulder of past us. Past us would never feel it, but we would like to do it anyway, not because it helps that insensate phenomenon in any way, but because it helps the present us to imagine past us having someone by his side to say, “Ignore them. That was not the stupidest, weirdest thing anyone has ever said or done,” or even, “Yes, you did that. You can’t undo it. Own it, and love it, you magnificent weirdo.” That’s sentiment.
So I guess I can go back in my mind to 1994 and not snicker at the guy standing outside thinking good thoughts about Jupiter if it made him happy, just as I now choose 2:07 AM and 2:09 AM as great times to publish blog posts for reasons that mean nothing to anyone else, and which do nothing for my past self, but which nevertheless make my present self very happy.
Aren’t you glad you asked, Cuba Badding, Senior?
Yours truly,
Yours Truly
Well! I must say, satisfying reader curiosity sets me up for the whole rest of the day! And in just two letters, we have heard from denizens of two of the seven commonly-accepted continents. I hope to hear from the rest of the world eventually, but all letters are welcomed.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Don't mind the hostility, Yours Truly. Some people are just not in tune with the wonders of Jupiter and to a greater extent - Wyoming. You are a wise hero, no doubt, and I enjoy your ramblings..er entries!
- Bear Spoon Face