What I don’t like about sports writing

24Apr08

I don’t like sports writers. I don’t like the contrived soundbites they convey, the cliched storylines they create, the false drama they so carefully cultivate. I don’t like the fact that most of them have no real qualifications, but a few years on the circuit gives them the title of ‘expert’ and, for example, allows ESPN.com to charge us for reading their hallowed opinions.

What really rankles me, though, is the quality of writing. Spot my problems with this paragraph:

But the principles they are now employing eventually may be considered the new “LeBron Rules.”

The Wizards are playing rough, invoking the Detroit “Bad Boys” on more than one occasion and not saying they’re sorry for knocking James on his backside as much as possible. Have other teams tried to send messages to James with hard fouls before? Sure. But not to this level and with this much apparent conspiracy, according to the man himself.

“I’ve been put on the floor before, but it has been a little different this year,” James said. “Hard fouls happen, but this is a difference.”

I bet you’re thinking I’m pissed off at Mr. Windhorst regurgitating the tired notion of “<Insert superstar’s name here> Rules”, a pointless multiplication of a single idea: to knock said superstar down as many times as possible. No, although his perpetual effort to parallel LeBron with Michael Jordan is transparent even to the blind; what bothers me is the simultaneous elevation of LeBron to hero status and the verbatim quote, which underscores his shortcomings off the basketball court.

(And let’s be clear, LeBron can’t plead Ebonics here — that sentence is just plain wrong.)

This isn’t an isolated incident, particularly given how poorly-spoken today’s sports superstars are. And that Mr. Windhorst is trying to convey LeBron’s thoughts exactly as he expressed them is hardly surprising given that he is a journalist. The problem is that raining hosannas upon LeBron’s head even as he is shown to be committing verbal faux pas galore (and without hesitation and without remorse — without even realising what the problem is!) is exactly why English, the language, sits on a slippery slope today. A slippery slope whose gradient we are ever-increasing by irresponsibly (even if it’s inadvertent) communicating that savaging English is OK.

Understand this isn’t a moral issue to me: I’m not talking about what we’re teaching our kids, I’m saying that the quality of the English we see and hear around us, on TV and in newspapers, is more or less the zenith of what we ourselves aspire to and will ultimately attain. So returning to the point, Mr. Windhorst and others like him would do well to either cut out the hero-worship and present their subjects as normal human beings rather than ideals that we should all admire and dream of emulating in all things, or employ the same artistic license they so happily abuse while serving up cliches and edit their subjects’ soundbites. For the sake of their subjects. And us all.

(Note that I feel bad about hammering Mr. Windhorst this way when more or less all media types are to blame. But I’m sure he understands I’m not trying to target him. And that this problem is bigger than us all. <Cue ‘Gladiator’ theme.>)

Shikwa

24Mar08

Watch this:

And the second part:

It’s quite remarkable. A tangent to my own confusion and complaints, but fascinating and insightful nevertheless. My favourite couplet is this, the fulcrum of the poem:

Even then you grumble, we are false, untrue,
If you call us faithless, tell us what are you?

From a historical point of view, it’s probably amazing that the Allama was able to get away with writing that (I know he got flak; I’m surprised he wasn’t shot).

Having said all that, I’m a bit disappointed with it. The poem is equal parts complaint and plea, with the purpose of both being for God to (re-)reveal himself to his believers. The real questions are never posed, a shortcoming that’s probably natural: the world Allama lived in was steeped in faith, whereas our perspective is coloured by the atheistic rationalism the world is currently exploring.

How many LSE staffers does it take to change a light bulb?

12Jan08

Honestly, I’ve had it up to here with the nincompoop-edness of LSE administrative folks. I’ve been waiting for my degree certificate since my December 18 graduation ceremony (which I didn’t attend). I assumed that graduates would have been handed their certificates there but it turned out that wasn’t the case, so I waited a couple of weeks until the Christmas and New Year holidays were over and then gave the Registrar’s Office a call, only to be redirected to the University of London because they’re the ones who issue the certificates.

Of course, the UoL sent me back to LSE because they have to send a list of names and degree classifications for the certificates to be issued. LSE told me the staffer responsible wasn’t in that day and that I should send her an email. I asked for her phone number and tried calling her several times over the next couple of days, but of course never got through.

At this point, I was getting sick of the whole process, so I took a couple of hours off work and went down to the LSE Student Services office to see someone in person and get it taken care of. After a fifteen minute wait in the queue (keep in mind this is the beginning of January, before classes have started…and that there was a staffer sitting at the counter browsing the ‘net while people were waiting), the staffer there told me that they absolutely couldn’t do anything to send the names early. I explained that I needed it for a visa application and asked her what she recommended, which predictably was that I get a transcript and a letter on LSE letterhead.

I could see I wasn’t getting anywhere so I politely said OK and asked her if she could have that prepared ASAP. Err…no. There’s a process, she explained to me as she handed me a glossy brochure and underlined the email address I would have to send the request to. I tried not to give her a dirty look as I asked her how long it would take. The answer, predictably, was 5 business days. At this point I was getting really pissed off, so with a level voice I said, “Look I don’t mean to be rude, but is there anything you guys can prepare for me anytime soon?” She was momentarily (but very visibly) taken aback but then recovered to try and feed me the “process” line again, adding that “we have a lot of students”. Right, and what I’m asking you to do is infinitely more complicated than pulling up my file and pushing a button to print a standard piece of paper.

I thanked her (a little gruffly) and went back to the office and sent an email to the address she had underlined. A few minutes later I got an auto-reply telling me I should request the transcript through their web-based system (”Look, we have the internets and we’re so cool!”). I knew that the email I had sent would eventually be read by a human being (who would hopefully have the sense to print out the transcript instead of being a smug turd), but I thought I should have a try with the web-based system as well; of course it threw an error and I wasn’t able to order them that way.

That was Wednesday. On Friday afternoon I learned that the human readers of my email were, in fact, smug turds: an email arrived telling me to use the online transcript ordering system.

You would think that for the more-than-10k fee international students pay for an LSE degree, they would have the decency to accommodate an urgent request. Apparently, they don’t.

The KSE bounces back

03Jan08

wow, what a surprise. So I guess we all really are as fickle and callous as I suggested in my last post. The good news from the article is:

Pakistani stocks are cheap and still worth holding in spite of political uncertainty, Merrill Lynch & Co.’s chief Asian strategist Mark Matthews said in an interview yesterday.

The country’s shares on average trade at 10 times reported earnings with a dividend yield of 6 percent, Matthews said, citing Merrill Lynch data. That’s compared with “consensus'’ valuations for Vietnamese stocks of 20 times, he said.

The Bhutto saga continues

01Jan08

…and now the backlash has begun. DM sent me this really interesting article called ‘The Prodigal Daughter’ (capitalisation mine, because apparently newspapers can’t afford the extra ink).

Written by an Oxford contemporary, Vir Sanghvi, the first half is a really fascinating summary of Ms. Bhutto’s personality and her activities at Oxford. The PPP media machine has drilled her resume into our heads — KGS, Harvard, Oxford, President of the Debating Union, one of the youngest PMs ever, first woman leader in a Muslim country — but in my experience it is rare to find first-hand accounts or opinions of what exactly it is that she’s done. For example, I never knew that she had finished at Oxford when she became President, nor that it was after several failed attempts, nor that her debating skills were in fact considered mediocre at best. And where the PPP stops, BBC and CNN happily take over, reminding us how she would ‘hold forth for hours in her native Urdu language to huge, often frenzied crowds’ (no matter the liberties she took with it, and them). All this ignores the biggest fudge of all: that her father, the Original Bhutto, was directly responsible for much of the mayhem and carnage of the 70s.

In the latter half of the article, the author considers — from a very pronounced Indian point-of-view — Ms. Bhutto’s political achievements. His view is that she was never bogged down by ideology or principle, but was simply an opportunist looking to gain her father’s approval and history’s good graces. It’s a little simplistic, but given how oligarchical Pakistani politics is, with its shroud of secrecy and the power derived from being in-the-know, it’s not surprising that this is what the rest of the world sees. Unfortunately here the article begins to devolve into a vague rant on Pakistan’s politics, as they pertain to India.

The last few days have forced a closer examination of where we as a nation are. Mr. Sanghvi’s article, and others like it, paint a bleak picture far removed from the optimism that Mr. Musharraf and his erstwhile PM, Shaukat Aziz, display. In the course of his rule, the Pakistani economy has thrived by all metrics (the most popular being the stock market) and in some ways the cause of democracy has been furthered (namely by the institution of more effective local government); I’m willing to accept these as facts and won’t dispute them. The flip side, however, is equally clear. Exports and imports have increased apace, so that improvements in the former do not constitute a clear gain in and of themselves. Our external debt has increased from $34bn to $42bn at a time when Nigeria and Argentina have completely paid back equivalent loans. Our power and water planning remain in the doldrums, with serious electricity shortfalls predicted from 2009 on (by serious, I mean that industry will suffer as well). And any improvements in government have been offset by official backing of suspect parties such as the PML-Q, the JUI and most egregiously, the MQM.

In summary, Mr. Musharraf’s economic and political capital is finished. And it’s easy to argue that in clinging to power so determinedly, he has severely drained Pakistan’s as well. Any gains we made from sidling up to the US after 9/11 have been wasted. The monetary handouts that Mr. Sanghvi speaks of and that will forever be held over our heads were mostly loans at slightly preferential rates, not grants; Mr. Musharraf accepted them indiscriminately and used them to buy the economic improvements that he now touts. The formulaic ham-handedness with which economic resources and policy have been apportioned means that service industries such as banking are the cornerstone of this economic growth, which is worrying because history has shown these tertiary industries are byproducts of a thriving economy and not the other way around and also because banking in particular is well-recognised as an opportunistic trade that offers no guarantees and certainly no loyalty, personal or patriotic. This holds doubly for the stock market, which (for crying out loud!) is characterised by its fickleness and speculation. (I’m trying to find a link to an article I read where, after the 4.7% dip on Monday, an analyst said he expects the market will recover since the KSE is known to undergo such fluctuations.)

Simultaneously, the constant association of Pakistan’s name with that of the Taleban (created by Pakistan), Islamofascist terrorists (educated in Pakistan), Al Qaeda (directed from within Pakistan) and Osama (sheltered by Pakistan), means that our reputation — that ‘immortal part’ of us, as Cassio would have put it — has been shattered in a limelight we have invited and directed ourselves. Mr. Musharraf has said that the US would have bombed Pakistan if he had acted differently, but that does not excuse the fact that the aftermath has been grossly mismanaged, with Mr. Musharraf trying to leverage the danger of militancy to win support both externally and internally, all the while oblivious of the damage to Pakistan. Equally, it’s amazing that Mr. Musharraf hasn’t realised that the White House has been using Pakistan as a shield for their own missteps, particularly to distract the American people from the fact that the Taleban and Al Qaeda are monsters of their own making.

Ultimately though, my biggest worry is that Ms. Bhutto’s assassination might go down in history as Pakistan’s Martin Luther King moment. As Mr. Sanghvi’s meandering article concludes, this so-called champion of democracy was a dynast in her own party and her political achievements were few — and certainly outweighed by the charges levelled against her. We can ill-afford to be championed by such ideological lightweights.

At the end of the day, Benazir’s death is a tragedy in the way that the death of any Pakistani — any human — is a tragedy. And unwarranted praise is only as wrong as unfair vilification.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.

“Incomplete calculations” in Excel Pivot tables

27Dec07

I’ve been working with Excel a lot these past few months. At least half my time these days is spent writing and running spreadsheets and interpreting the results I get from them. In many cases, I run a lengthy batch of calculations overnight and then have Excel produce a pivot table and save the results somewhere. This has forced me to learn some of the bizarre things Excel does (Banker’s rounding, anyone?), the most irritating of which has been this:

Incomplete Calculation

(The blacked out bit is just the name of my spreadsheet.)

That one is followed immediately by this:

Pivot table field name invalid

And what, pray, does that mean? Incomplete calculation? OK…except my workbook contains no calculations at all (I’m saving down only values and my pivot table — no formulas), and I get this error when refreshing my pivot table. Invalid field name? Clearly not — I can see the columns are correctly labelled and everything. Naturally, I ran the job by hand and tried refreshing the pivot table to see if I could reproduce the error. Nope. Google? Nope — nothing interesting there.

It turns out the problem is the fact that underlying a pivot table is a pivot cache. This is an Excel object that stores the actual representation of the table in memory and is saved down with your spreadsheet. My jobs would run the calculations, display the results and the pivot table, and then copy them to a fresh workbook in order to save them down. The problem was that I would then close the workbook where the calculations where actually performed: since the pivot table had been created in it, the pivot cache was stored in there, and since it wasn’t saved after the batch was complete (all the results were saved to a new sheet), the pivot cache was lost. So, what Excel was actually trying to say was that it no longer had an internal representation of the pivot table and therefore could not refresh it.

The solution was simply to change the order in which I did things: I now perform my calculations and display the results, and then copy them to a new workbook before producing the pivot table. In this way, the pivot cache is created in the workbook that is to be saved, and there’s no longer a problem.

Out of sight, out of mind

23Nov07

A couple of weeks ago, Newsweek’s cover proclaimed that Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world. It was only mildly disturbing, since constant immersion in hostile media does tend to numb one’s senses.

I came across this wonderful article a few days ago. Every once in a while, an article comes by that scrapes the callouses off your brain and reminds you why you feel so strongly about your country. My country. My country.

(And reminds you why you feel so personally embarrassed by, and distraught at, the complete and blatant lack of integrity that allows our one-time rivals to casually brand us a failed state.)

Insanity

18Nov07

There’s so much of it to pick from, but here’s a sampler:

  • The IJT has expelled 17 members over the Imran Khan incident. Yay. But brace yourself now for the ‘operation’ that the IJT will launch to maintain its ‘hold on PU’. Na Islami, na Talib, siraf Jamia.
  • Mr. Musharraf isn’t in right now. Choice quote: “Before March, I was very good”. This is like a sequel to that excellent Drunk Uncle article.
  • Jemima chimes in about BB. The article is an opinion piece and preempts accusations of bias in its opening paragraphs, so that on the whole it’s pretty unremarkable. But go here (Facebook) to find people wondering whether women are intelligent enough to write, whether Jemima has any credibility given that she’s been frolicking on beaches with Hugh Grant, and just about every other irrelevant angle they can find on her. It’s a classic ad hominem argument, ignoring entirely her point and purpose.

BB speaks

16Nov07

Benazir Bhutto - Musharraf’s Electoral Farce (washingtonpost.com)

Oh, how I loathe BB. Even ignoring the Musharraf-size ego (regarding arrested political activists: “the majority [are] from my PPP”), she shows once again she’s perfectly happy to throw everyone and everything under the wagon to get her way, for example by implying that Musharraf could easily lay his hands on OBL if he chose — an implication that suggests Pakistan(is) know where OBL is.

Listen up, lady: you haven’t been elected yet either, so please recognise the irony in your rants about the current regime’s illegitimacy, and understand that this is not your personal waterfight with Musharraf but an opportunity to rectify the decades of negligence and delinquency our leaders have wrought upon us.

(A couple of very pimp, though tardy, posts on the situation are coming up. Stay tuned.)

Genius….

02Sep07

…is what this is.

Stages of intelligence

25Aug07
  1. Certainty
  2. Uncertainty
  3. Certainty about uncertainty
  4. Uncertainty about uncertainty
  5. Certainty about the uncertainty of uncertainty

I’m not sure if that pattern continues (there’s a tower law in there after stage 5, I think). My data suggests ‘achievers’ inhabit the odd-numbered stages; ‘thinkers’ and ‘feelers’ inhabit the even-numbered ones.

Make sense?

8

03Aug07

PylaKasha tagged me, so here we go with 8 things about me.

  1. I’m a little bit of a snob, and a little self-centered. Like I saw this on Kyla’s blog and mentally snorted and thought, ‘not me’. And then I thought, ooh, a solicitation to yap. About me, no less. Doesn’t happen every day. But it’s OK, because I balance the snobbishness and the self-centeredness with ridiculous levels of empathy and self-awareness. Oh, and in case you missed it, I’m proud of all this.

  2. I have outlandish interests. Here are a few things that excite me: mythology, philosophy, basketball, comics, jazz, stationery.

  3. I used to be a voracious reader when I was a kid. Like, sprawled-on-the-sofa-in-my-locked-room-reading-all-afternoon-voracious. But not so much anymore. It’s not just that I don’t have time: my priorities have changed. And it does pain me to say this.

  4. I feel like I would be much happier if I was born 70 years ago. A few things that may or may not explain why I feel like this: people calling each other ‘babe’ and women calling everyone their ‘babiesssss’; the ridiculous overuse of the terms ‘legend’ and ‘hero’; the stupid description of women as ‘females’; people’s general lack of manners and/or dignity; the increase in xenophobia and intolerance because of globalisation and the ‘free and open’ availability of information; bad music; the continuing evolution of life into a competition without any sense of bounds or an established finish line; disillusionment because of where we are as a race compared to where we should be.

  5. I write a lot of stuff for this blog, but don’t publish half of it. Sometimes I publish something, and then unpublish it a minute later and hope no one’s RSS reader got to it in the interim. It’s one of those paradoxes: it’s hard to be open about yourself without the cover of anonymity. (Incidentally, this might be one of the more open posts I’ve made…)

  6. I don’t know what the big deal is about Harry Potter, and no I haven’t read the books. I watched a couple of the movies and that’s enough for me. If you want to read truly marvellous fiction, read ‘Excalibur’ by Cornwell.

  7. I don’t play by the rules. Like I didn’t insert the rubric on top, and I’m not going to tag anyone (this thing reeks of a chain letter). Oh, and I’m stopping at 7.




May 2008
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
 

About

Uzair is. That's all you need to know.