Ray Mancini on the Duk Koo Kim Fight

The BBC interviews Ray Mancini on the fateful fight 31 years ago this week:

On 13 November 1982, reigning WBA lightweight world champion, Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini was due to defend his title against challenger, the South Korean Kim Deuk-koo.
In Mancini's words it was going to be an "action fight" in front of a 15,000-strong crowd at Las Vegas's fabled Caesar's Palace venue. Millions more were tuning in at home on TV.
It was a fight that Mancini went on to win but his opponent suffered fatal injuries that would cause great controversy and change the sport.
Thirty-one years on from that fateful night, Ray Mancini talks about the fight.

The video is at the link (no embed feature).  More on the fight and its impact here.

Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Well, I really fucked up today.  Last night, the head which connects the sickle bar to the wobble box broke.  So this morning, I got the replacement part put on and fired up the machine.  As I headed across the field to get started, there was a huge boom and really bad sounds started coming out.  I shut it down and went to investigate.  There were chunks of cast iron on the ground behind the combine.  Here I had left the four pound hammer on the platform, and it didn't feed through the machine well.  I found some ground up pieces of handle in the grass waterway beside the field, but I still haven't found the head.  It really worked over the rasp bars on the rotor and took out a couple of chopper knives.  Then, we found some other things that were screwed up previously, so we got absolutely nothing done.

I hadn't heard this song until these guys came to our county seat, but the chorus made me chuckle a bit because I can relate.  I'll send this out to my combine:

Don't Give Up The Ship

Jeff St. Clair visits a bicentennial re-enactment of the Battle of Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay, and remembers Oliver Hazard Perry:

Two hundred years ago today, a young U.S. naval captain named Oliver Hazard Perry penned the words, "We have met the enemy and they are ours ..."
Perry's remarkable victory over the British changed the course of the War of 1812, and a full-scale re-enactment — the largest sailing re-enactment ever attempted in the U.S. — recently commemorated the anniversary of the win in the Battle of Lake Erie.

America had brashly declared war in 1812 to stop the British from kidnapping U.S. sailors to man the Royal Navy and to settle trade issues. A year later, the war against the world's leading superpower wasn't going well.
It was from Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie's South Bass Island that Perry sailed out to meet the British on Sept. 10, 1813.
Historian Walter Rybka — one of the planners of the re-enactment — says the 28-year-old Perry threw himself into battle. "Perry was, first off, phenomenally brave and determined, but he was damn lucky," Rybka says.
Somehow Perry survived two hours of hellacious fire that killed or maimed 75 percent of the crew on his ship, the Lawrence.
"His last gun had been knocked out of action on the starboard side, his rigging was cut to pieces, he could not maneuver, he could no longer fight. There was no point in maintaining an action because his men were just going to get slaughtered the rest of the way," Rybka says. "Right at the moment the wind fills in ..."
And that's when Perry hopped into his longboat and under heavy fire, rowed to the Niagara, a Great Lakes warship. Rybka says Perry brought along his battle flag, emblazoned with the words, "Don't Give Up The Ship."
"But the only way to do that was to give up the ship and go to the next one," Rybka says. "The real motto was, 'Don't Give Up.' "
The battle was a turning point in the War of 1812. America had lost Detroit and much of the Northwest Territory. Rybka says if Perry had given up the ship, the Canadian border would have been much farther south.
"I think Michigan probably would have been lost to us and maybe Wisconsin as well," Rybka says.

More on the battle here.

The Day A Fan Got Put In A Soocer Game

The Guardian  (h/t Ritholtz):

Harry Redknapp delights in telling this particular yarn. Last time he told the story it was on TV show A League of Their Own, at Christmas last year. "There's a guy next to the dug-out," Harry told the host, "and he's got West Ham tattooed all over his arms and neck, he's got the earrings … After two minutes, he started on me." Today, speaking to me in his third one-on-one interview since taking over as QPR boss, he slips into storytelling mode.
"'We ain't got that Lee Chapman up front do we – I ain't coming every week if he's playing,'" says Harry, doing his impression of Steve. "Half-time I made five substitutions, and we only had the bare 11 out – I was running out of players. Then we got another injury, so I said to this guy in the crowd, 'Oi, can you play as good as you talk?'"
The rest of the tale is hallowed football folklore. "I slung a leg over the barrier and Harry walked me down the tunnel," says Steve. "What's your name, son?" Harry asked, sizing up this apparent hooligan. "I couldn't believe it. Inside the dressing room, the players were sat down resting at half-time." West Ham were two-nil up, but the team was carrying injuries. "Then Harry and says, 'Lee you're off; Steve you're on.'"

Even more amazing:

Half an hour previously, he had been sucking on a cigarette in the away supporters' end, swigging from a bottle, and considering a third beer. Now he's taken the pass in stride and is in front of goal; City's veteran keeper Colin Fleet is bearing down on him, palms out, head down. The summer sun has dropped low beneath the bare trees on the horizon, painting the entire scene gold and casting long shadows.
"I just hit it," he says with a shrug. "I hit it like nothing else. Know what I mean? I belted it." The ball whistled low, past the outstretched hand of the Oxford goalkeeper, and ran into the bottom corner of the goal. Steve says he wheeled away in celebration, arms extended, head bent with disbelief. On the side of the field, Redknapp turned around and looked briefly to the heavens.
"It was like time stopped still – it was the greatest moment of my life," says Steve. Somewhere in the crowd, Bazza and Chunk were losing their minds. Steve Davies had scored on his West Ham debut.
"After that, I was exhausted. I was on 30 cigarettes a day back then," Steve admits. "I wouldn't condone it. I had a couple of cigs and a couple of beers in the first half, didn't I?" He admits his goal was not spectacular: "I'm not gonna butter myself up, but they all count." And when the full-time whistle blew, West Ham had won 4–0. Steve walked down the tunnel with the rest of his team-mates, jubilant.

I don't think there is a fan alive who at some point in their life didn't dream about something like that happening to them.  That it actually did happen to somebody is incredible.

The Origin of Ritual

Jim Davies, via the Dish:

n 1948 the Polish born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski published a book on a study he conducted of the fishermen of the Trobriand Islands. Sometimes they fished in an inner lagoon, where fishing was pretty predictable. Every time they fished there, they got pretty much the same kind of catch. But they also fished in the open ocean, where the fish were bigger and harder to catch. Sometimes people would get great catches, and other times, terrible ones.  The lure of the very rare great catch proved too tempting for the Trobrianders, so they ventured into the open ocean despite the odds—and developed a set of superstitions. These included rituals performed during fishing and the casting of magic spells.
The circumstance dictated the explosion of rituals. We might think this is a completely human adaptation.  But it turns out that the tendency to resort to ritual in an effort to manage a challenging situation isn’t exclusive to humans. In the same year that Malinowski published his experiment, American psychologist B. F. Skinner found that he could generate superstitious behavior in pigeons. He taught pigeons to press down on a bar in exchange for food. All animals can learn to do this, and this learning process is called reinforcement. But an interesting thing happens if the food is given at random intervals—that is, pressing the bar sometimes does, and sometimes does not, produce a treat, with no discernable pattern. Under these conditions, but not under reliable conditions, the pigeon will start repeating arbitrary, idiosyncratic behaviors before pressing the bar. It might bob its head, or turn around twice. The pigeon becomes superstitious.
It’s as though the pigeon believes, at some level, that there is a reliable way to get a food pellet. It is the pigeon’s experience that pressing on the bar isn’t enough, because that doesn’t always work. So when the food actually comes, the pigeon looks at what it was doing before and wonders if those arbitrary actions—turning the head, making a noise—had something to do with the food delivery. The pigeon tries those things, and sometimes the food does indeed come. But sometimes the pigeon performs the ritual and the food still doesn’t come.
One would think that this would convince the pigeon that getting or not getting the treat has nothing to do with behavior. Similarly, in baseball, the batter can’t point to a direct correlation between tapping their foot on home plate and batting a double. The brave Trobriand fisherman who ventures out into the open sea after practicing a particular ritual can’t rely on the spirits’ goodwill. Voltaire and the philosophers from the Age of Reason would want us to apply rational tools and to understand that there is no connection between cause and effect.
Yet—whether for humans or pigeons—the opposite turns out to be true. There seems to be something in the brain that, when confronted with no easily discernable pattern between one’s action and the outcome, seeks to forge a bridge and create a story that unites the two events—one an action that you can take, and therefore a reliable bet, and two, an event with a low probability of occurrence.

The pigeon shit is fascinating.  One thing I appreciate from being raised in Catholicism is the appreciation of ritual.  I remember the comfort I gained from the familiar rhythms of mass as I was mourning one of my best friends who was killed in a car wreck back when I was 20.  At that time, I gained some appreciation for the value of ritual to deal with the highs and lows of life.  Like the pigeons, we are all comforted by these actions.

When it Rains...

Actually, it probably ought to say, when it doesn't rain, because we're getting pretty dry right now.  The best year ever is starting to look like the best corn crop with an average bean crop.  But to go back to the title of the post, things have seemed to be falling apart the last few weeks.  Not only with the weather, but with work.  We've lost two folks in our engineering department, in which I do some work.  Then, today was the last day for my immediate boss in the environmental and safety side of things.  He handled all of the safety for three companies while I helped him out with the environmental side of things.  I've tried to let people know that I am not qualified to handle any of his duties, but I haven't really heard how they plan on taking care of things while they work to find a replacement.  Probably some of that work will devolve to me.  And I won't even get into where I really am killing myself.  Anyway, under normal circumstances I'd say that the sun will shine again, but right now, I'm looking for a rain cloud as a positive outcome.  Actually, for the vast swath of humanity, I'm still sitting pretty good.

The Most Important Driver of History

Via Ritholtz:

The big ball could say luck, also.

Is American Exceptionalism A Historical Quirk?

New York Magazine:

If you buy Gordon’s story, then the effect of the second industrial revolution was to replace the specific entitlement of the Gilded Age (of family, of place of birth) with a powerful general entitlement, earned simply through citizenship. “Just the fact of being an American male and graduating from high school meant you could have a good-paying job and expect that you could have children who would double your own standard of living,” Gordon says. This certainty, that the future would be so much better than the past that it could be detected in the space of a generation, is what we call the American Dream. The phrase itself was coined only in 1931, once the gains of the second industrial revolution had dispersed and inequality had begun to dissipate. There is a whole set of manners, which we have come to think of as part of our national identity, that depends upon this expectation that things will always get better: Our laissez-faire-ism; our can-do-ism; the optimistic cast of our religiosity, which persisted even when other Western nations turned toward atheism; our cult of the individual. We think of the darkening social turn that happened around 1972 as having something to do with the energies of the sixties collapsing in on themselves, but in Gordon’s description something more mechanistic was happening. “The second industrial revolution had run its course,” he says, and so, in many ways, had its social implications.

What happened around 1972 (actually 1971)?   U.S. oil production peaked.  The days of easy energy are over, and we'll pay an economic cost for that going forward.  For all our productivity gains with technology, the drag of lowered return on investment for energy production will be a drain on our economy.  A lot of other things also figure into our stagnation, including a reversion to mean for our standard of living.  Right now the folks at the top are improving their standard of living at the expense of everyone else, while the rest of us slowly start to slide toward the rest of the world population.  I don't think that arrangement can continue for long.  Like Gordon, I do believe that our post-war prosperity was a fluke event.  How we handle the implications of that will be very interesting.