Commuting has been part of the human experience since the Industrial Revolution. Ever since the workplace and the home got firmly disentangled, people have been waking up and resignedly making their way to their place of employment. The amount of culture that has developed about the idea of commuting is enormous, including the “knocker-up” of 19th and early 20th century Britain who served, before the advent of universal alarm clocks, as a wake-up call for workers by tapping on their windows in the morning with a long pole.

It is probably safe to say that few have ever really enjoyed their commute [1], a feeling best exemplified by the opening scene of the movie Office Space, from which this excerpt comes (warning, very bad language):

Commuting has had a fair amount of academic analysis applied to it. The distance/time people are willing to commute is affected by (among other things) the wages on offer. In a study of commuting in North Carolina in the 1960s, most workers at two factories lived within 30 miles of the factory, but 22% of those at the higher waged fiber plant were willing to live more than 30 miles out, while only 1.3% of the shirt factory workers were.[2]

I work in Washington, DC and the commuting options are legion. The standard option, driving, is my least favorite. Parking in central DC is tightly restricted and expensive. Traffic is slow, with Washington the 9th most congested city in the United States. Despite its broad avenues, DC isn’t really well suited for traffic, and there are out-of-towners still endlessly circling the Dupont Circle roundabout, hoping against hope that someone will let them over so they can get out. “Traffic is terrible on the circle, in volume, confusion, and rage,” as one observer puts it.

The next option is much better. DC’s Metro is justly famous for the beauty of its stations. It’s also (despite a fair amount of grumbling by residents) a relatively efficient and comprehensive service. It does have a fare system that would confuse Albert Einstein, especially if Albert was on vacation and more interested in seeing sights than figuring out how much it would be to get from Bethesda to Arlington (don’t forget to add $1 to the fare for a paper fare card!). Note the fare chart:

I make my positive evaluation, I should also say, despite the tendency of Metro trains occasionally to catch on fire explosively:

So most days I take the metro, walking to the station in Takoma and from the station in Dupont Circle. It’s about 40 minutes door-to-door.

The final option is biking, which I am starting up again now that the weather is reasonably cooperative. It’s about six miles door-to-door, mostly downhill on the way in, and (sob) the opposite on the way back. DC’s a pretty bike-friendly place, with a fair number of bike lanes (at least in the center of the city) and even a bike-specific stop-light at 16th street. There’s still the normal hassles of traffic and weather: 1) don’t mess with cars with diplomatic license plates; 2) when it is 105 degrees outside, think twice before biking or, at least, drink a lot of fluids.[3]

Bikes have changed a lot since my youth (also? Get off my lawn, you kids.) When I was growing up, we had three speed bikes and ten speed bikes. You started off on three speeds and then graduated up. The introduction of the mountain bike was a radical shifting of this bicycle universe. Now? There are enough types of bikes to have a wikipedia entry dedicated solely to them. When I was buying my bike, I decided to avoid most of the fancy bits (suspension, disc brakes, espresso machine) and got a basic road bike. It’s fast, light, and handles the DC roads with aplomb. DC doesn’t have massive hills, though this one (15th street just north of Florida Ave) is pretty reasonable (note twin bike paths in background; just out of sight at the top is the cemetery for riders who died on the way up) [4]:

So it’s usually a good, fun, relatively short ride in to work (35-40 minutes). Being a information-nerd, I, of course, have an app that tracks my progress and plays music (using the speaker; headphones seem too dangerous). It usually gets to the embarrassing songs on my playlist just when I’m stopped at a light next to another bicyclist.

I’m not a really committed rider. I don’t go if the weather’s not good, or in winter, or if I Just Don’t Feel Like It. But of all the commuting methods, biking feels like it gives me the most control and least frustration. That’s a valuable thing, given the alternative:

Alan Maley, Commuter (excerpt):

He lives in a house in the suburbs.
He rises each morning at six.
He runs for the bus to the station,
Buys his paper and looks at the pics.

Commuting: regimentation, control, and freedom, all wrapped up in a neat, usually boring, little package.

[1] Alois Stutzer, and Bruno S Frey. “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox*.” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 110, no. 2 (2008): 339-366.
[2] Richard E. Lonsdale, “Two North Carolina Commuting Patterns.” Economic Geography 42, no. 2 (1966): 114-138. Map from p. 123.
[3] No, we are not having the Climate Olympics (“Where I live, it gets up to 150 degrees, with molten lava falling from the sky! You have it easy!”) in the comments.
[4] There isn’t really a cemetery there. Also, we’re not having the Terrain Olympics either. People in Seattle and San Francisco, I’m looking at you

But after more than a decade, Ms. Harris, a cheerful 61-year-old grandmother, grew tired of the characters, even as her hyper-dedicated followers lusted for more. She ran out of fresh story lines about her bubbly blond protagonist, Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who tangles with an ever-expanding supernatural cast of vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, demons, goblins, elves, witches and fairies. She struggled to keep track of the convoluted mythology she’d invented. Things that used to excite her, like unveiling new supernatural creatures, started to feel stale.

So Ms. Harris decided to shut down the lucrative franchise she created. When the 13th book, “Dead Ever After,” hits bookstores next week, it will mark the end of the Sookie Stackhouse series.

Harris is not sad about the end:

[As] I publish the final novel about my heroine, I suppose I should say I’m filled with nostalgia. In truth, I’m not. I’m looking forward to future projects and to more world building and more characters. To me, the last book is not the end of anything, but another mark of passage. I hope my readers will go with me into new adventures; I’m excited about the future.

As Harris is discovering however, that while it is easy to tire of one’s fictional creations, it is (especially if they are popular) sometimes hard to get the public to accept their end. Harris has already received critical emails, and one fan has threatened suicide. Stackhouse, it appears, is not going to go gently into the good night, vampire or not.

Perhaps the most famous historical example of this was Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle, a doctor, wrote the early Sherlock Holmes novels as a sideline to his medical practice. But he wrote at a key moment in publishing history, when waves of newspapers were appearing, courtesy of newly cheap mechanized printing presses and a reasonably literate public. The same public that made Charles Dickens’ serialized novels a hit snapped up the Holmes’ short stories hungrily. Conan Doyle soon wrapped up his medical practice to concentrate on writing full time, but he was ambivalent. He found plotting the Holmes’ stories to be time-consuming and, worse, looked down on the stories as low-brow entertainment. He was much more enamored of his historical fiction.

The result, in 1893, was his decision of murder his own creation, which he did in the short story “The Final Problem” There was immediate and overwhelming public grief over the death, but Conan Doyle, like Harris now, was unrepentant, saying:

I have been much blamed for doing that gentleman to death, but I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defense, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.

Despite the risk of death, Conan Doyle did not long resist the public pressure to bring back Holmes, which included facetious suggestions at public dinners, as one 1901 letter to the New York Times laid out:

Mr. Holmes was not the sort of man to allow a little thing like falling down an Alpine precipice to give him his quietus…At a dinner to Dr. Doyle at the Lotos Club I ventured to give voice to this skepticism by asking these questions: may it not be that knowing just where he was going to be hurled from, Sherlock Holmes took the precaution to place a big bouncing feather bed where it would gently receive his falling body? Or may it not be that, coincidental with his downward plunge, a providential balloon – which had been telegraphed for – came along and received him safe and sound into its basket? [1]

In what must have been a great shock, the letter writer related, Conan Doyle did not “take any stock” in the suggestion of a “providential balloon.” But the good doctor found it impossible to resist the public pressure much longer, and Holmes returned just after the turn of the century, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles (held by Conan Doyle to have happened pre-death) and then, for good, in “The Adventure of the Empty House.” [2]

Here, he was disguised as an old bookseller. When the disguise was revealed, it was, of course, to Dr. Watson:

When I turned again, Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life. Certainly a gray mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone and the tingling after-taste of brandy upon my lips. Holmes was bending over my chair, his flask in his hand.

“My dear Watson,” said the well-remembered voice, “I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.”

I gripped him by the arms.

“Holmes!” I cried. “Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?”

Well, yes. Public demands, and all that. Conan Doyle was somewhat resigned to the situation, but still complained “If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.” At that moment, perhaps, but no one would have remembered him for much longer.[2]

Sookie Stackhouse’s fate may not be quite so drastic, or quite so erratic, but if Charlaine Harris thinks she’s done with the character, there are many millions eager to dissuade her.

[Update: Also a problem for TV series]—–
[1] 9 February 1901.
[2] Conan Doyle really couldn’t win. Upon the publication of the new Sherlock Holmes adventure, the Times reviewer sniffily note that “the present commentator, for one, thinks that the distinctive literary quality of Dr. Doyle’s first book…’Micah Clarke,’ is finer than anything he has done since.” 4 March 1905.

The charge of homophobia is equally easy to refute. If I really were a “gay-basher”, as some headline writers so crassly suggested, why would I have asked Andrew Sullivan, of all people, to be the godfather of one of my sons, or to give one of the readings at my wedding?

Niall Ferguson goes for the “some of my best friends are gay” argument.

As a followup to the FDR post:

88th Congress (January 1963 – January 1965):

Senate:
63 Democrats,
35 Republicans

House:
258 Democrats,
177 Republicans

89th Congress (January 1965 – January 1967):

Senate: 68 Democrats, 32 Republicans
House: 295 Democrats, 140 Republicans

90th Congress (January 1967 – January 1969):

Senate:64 Democrats, 35 Republicans
House: 247 Democrats, 187 Republicans

The caveat here is that many of the Democrats were southern, and LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) alienated quite a few of them (Much honor to “Smilin’ Ralph” Yarborough, Democratic Senator of Texas, and the only Southern Democrat in the Senate to vote for the CRA). The flip side, of course, is there was still that rare and mythical beast, a liberal Republican, in those times. Six of those Republicans voted for the CRA, helping break the filibuster.

This is not to absolve Obama of his failures, but to point out that it’s a lot easier to deal with those failures and flaws if – as did both FDR and LBJ – your party has substantial majorities in both houses of Congress throughout your administration.

The Undercard

After the match

This is one of those posts where the research led me to an unexpected and excellent bit of historical minutiae. Apparently, during the implementation of the CRA, Strom Thurmond waged a guerrilla war against it (hello, Obamacare!) by delaying where he could the appointment of people to the necessary offices. At one point, this led he and Yarborough to have a wrestling match in the hall outside of a committee hearing. No, really, a wrestling match:

The 200-pound Texan and the 170-pound South Carolinian, both with their coats off, were rolling and thrashing across the marble floor to the startled dismay of an audience of secretaries and clerks. At one point in the 10-minute encounter Senator Thurmond, who had Senator Yarborough pinned to the floor, offered to quit if the Texan would give up. They did struggle to their feet once, but immediately fell to again without any pretense of playful good humor. They swayed back and forth across the corridor for a minute or two, shoulder to shoulder, and then Senator Thurmond threw Senator Yarborough to the floor again. The Texan narrowly missed a bad bump on his head when he landed.

Eventually, the committee chair came out and broke it up. Now that’s what I call Democratic infighting.

Now comes the hard part: Can movie studios, mired in a steep box-office slump, keep the momentum going?

Between the first weekend in May and Labor Day, a period that typically accounts for 40 percent of annual movie ticket sales, Hollywood rapidly parades its biggest floats — loud, visual-effects-laden behemoths like the coming “Man of Steel” and “Lone Ranger” that cost $200 million (or more) to make and $150 million to market globally.

I note that May to September is a four-month stretch, i.e. roughly 33% of the year. Getting 40% of revenue in 33% of the year hardly strikes me as hugely disproportionate. Certainly, it’s substantial, but not really worthy of the “tent-pole” treatment that summer gets in the movie industry, yet the Times reports the figure breathlessly and with grave import.

Being the Cato Institute however, that’s not interesting, so they spin it around. More government spending leads to lower GDP:

Higher government spending growth in a year corresponds to reduced private GDP growth that year. For example, if real government spending growth was zero, private GDP would be expected to grow at 4.2 percent. If real government spending growth was 5 percent, private GDP growth would be expected to fall to 2.8 percent.

IT’S THE GOVERNMENT’S FAULT. BIG GOVERNMENT BAD, LITTLE GOVERNMENT GOOD. DROWN IT IN THE BATHTUB.

What’s really happening, of course, is that during recessions, government spending goes up because of unemployment insurance and welfare programs in general get more (unfortunately) customers. It’s not that government spending knocks down private GDP, it’s that government spending tends to go up when GDP is shrinking.

(Update: Welcome, Paul Krugman readers. Dr. Krugman has a quality title for his link (better than my original): Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression)

Senate: 59 Ds, 36 Rs
House: 311 Ds, 117 Rs

74th Congress:

Senate: 70 Ds, 23 Rs.
House: 322 Ds, 103 Rs.

75th Congress:

Senate: 75 Ds, 16 Rs.
House: 334 Ds, 88 Rs.

76th Congress:

Senate: 70 Ds, 22 Rs
House: 256 Ds, 173 Rs.

These all come at the beginning of each term and carry us through January, 1941. So, for his first two terms, FDR’s smallest majority in the Senate was 21 23 and his average majority was 44.

In case you missed that: his average majority was 44 (bolded just f@#$#$$ because).

Number of votes needed to invoke cloture in the Senate during FDR’s first two terms: 64. So, for three out of four Congresses during FDR’s first two terms, he had a filibuster-proof majority.

In the House, FDR’s smallest majority was 83 and his average majority was 186.

Yes, he had to deal with a lot of conservative Southern Democrats during this period who would be Republicans now. You can, however, lose a lot of people and still win the vote when your majority is in the “Holy @#$#, How Large Is Your Majority?” range.

It’s easier to be a great President when your party owns the legislative branch.

[Updated to add cloture numbers]

As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities – the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.

The Czech Republic, also not monetary instrument.

Indeed, while Jenny has never come out and publicly opposed Mark’s congressional candidacy — choosing to remain officially neutral — she’s waged a brutally effective passive-aggressive campaign against it. Whether it was revealing to me that Mark had shamelessly asked her to manage his election bid; or telling the Washington Post that, until the night Mark’s fiancée showed up onstage at his victory party in April, one of her sons had never met the woman; or just generally making it known that she is furious that he’s running, Jenny has done a masterful job of keeping her ex-husband’s past (and not-so-past) transgressions in the news. She has seeded the ground with political land mines, stood back, and waited for Mark to step on one.

The conniving ex-wife is a tired stereotype and the article headline’s bald assertion “How Savvy Jenny Sanford Sabotaged Ex-Husband Mark’s Political Comeback” is just wrong. What sabotaged Mark Sanford’s political career was his tendency to fly off to meet with another woman while still married, put out an embarrassing lie about it, and then generally face-plant into the mud on a regular basis thereafter. Jenny Sanford was collateral damage in all this, not an instigator.

During last night’s play-by-play, Vin Sculley (the legendary Dodgers’ announcer) invoked the Sword of Damocles to talk about Chad Billingsley, the pitcher:

He pitches ‘with the Sword of Damocles over his head.’ That’s an old Greek legend. The ruler was Dionysus, and he had a guy in the courtier – in the court – who would always talk about how great the ruler had it. So finally, the ruler said, ‘Ok. I’ll tell you how great it is.’ – the pitch is high, ball two – and he had a big dinner for Damocles and there at the head of the table was the chair and the beautiful table set up. Damocles sat down and directly above his head was a huge sword and it was tied by one horse hair.

The perfection there, of course, is the momentary interjection: “high, ball two.”

It is only appropriate that the batter then hit a home run.