Articleman's blog

Vancouver Deserves a Love Note

Articleman — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 20:51:05 +0000

This blog is to confess my ardent love for Vancouver, British Columbia. I returned for my second visit on August 1, and left on August 6. Like every great trip you ever take, I know that I'll come back. But I'm not coming back to do a thing, or see a place. I'm coming back for the whole spirit of Vancouver, which you see more in the interstitial gaps between the things you did, the places you saw, and what you ate. The whole of this city is much greater than the sum of those parts.

Vancouver is a diverse and welcoming city. It is majority-minority, like New Mexico and Hawaii. The "visible minorities," as the Canadians analyze things, are almost all Asian -- Chinese, subcontinental Indian, and Filipino most prominently. Like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and other successfully diverse cities, Vancouver is a seamless, unselfconscious blend of ethnicities. It feels like Canadian Seattle, and from the mixes of people in residential and commercial areas, to the interracial couples you see, to the way public art unifies the different heritages of western Canada, you feel a place greatly at ease with itself, and decidedly postracial, in the best sense of that still fairly aspirational word.

Like each of those cities, Vancouver not coincidentally is a profoundly great food city. When here, you can dine at Tojo's, a deservedly famous sushi place. During our visit, the chef who has retired most every local, Canadian and many foreign foodie awards was working the bar. After the tremendous meal of pretty simple but amazing sashimi, my son and I thanked him, and as we left, he had the staff give us gifts of nice Tojo chopsticks. Equally welcoming and equally good, I went to Kumare in suburban Richmond and had a Filipino meal equal to or better than highly-touted Sunda in Chicago (the fanciest, most celebrated restaurant that serves Filipino food in the US). Kumare is in a little suburban strip mall amid currency exchanges and dollar stores, but it is clean and upscale in presentation. The sizzling pork sisig, a fatty, fragrantly spiced pork breakfast with egg and red onion, was simply amazing. The lechon kawali -- pork belly flash-fried but still soft and succulent, served with a remarkably subtle sarsa, or Filipino sauce with a hint of sourness -- totally rocked. And the halo halo (the Filipino national dessert, literally "mix mix") was equally great, with purple yam ice cream, coconut gel, sweet red and pink beans, grassy gel, a symphony of random sweet goodness. A must-try in trendy Gastown is Guu Otomakae, a Japanese homestyle place with excellent and surprisingly midpriced sushi. Apparently, nothing says Japanese-Canadian homestyle cooking like a Wrigleyville sporty atmosphere and loud Motown music. And of course there is the ubiquitous Japadog, which utterly shames the inedible nonsense passing for street-cart food in Manhattan, giving you Kurobuta pork dogs oozing with flavor, and your choice of Japanese mayos, seaweed, and other unorthodox toppings, accompanies by "shaked fries" of butter and soy or garlic and spice. Vancouver's food scene -- I had remarkable steak and American comfort food too -- is remarkable.

Beyond ethnic diversity, the city is the single most gay-friendly place I have ever been. August 4 was a vast Pride parade, drawing (it is asserted) over 600,000 participants and/or celebrants. The city has a small number of core activities designated as principal Vancouver cultural events, and the Pride parade is one. The official aspects are less relevant than the people. Everyone wanted to know if we were going to the parade. Two gay men selling high-end chocolate on Granville Island wanted to know. The young woman selling cheap shirts at Motherland. Folks at the hotel. Vancouver streets and businesses are filled with rainbows this week, and the gay diversity, in the people you encounter and the moments that slide by in the day, blend in the same as Vancouver's racial diversity. Vancouver is a very post- city. It is comfortable with itself and its inhabitants in the way a 21st Century city should be.

This leads me to a further reason I love Vancouver so ardently. It is a gentle place, in the way Canada (at its best) can be gentle and kind. A father elbowing me at the Van Aquarium seemed racked with guilt. The waitress at Edible Canada seemed actually to care whether you liked the poutine. Someone ushers a screaming child to a more secluded place, but makes it seem like a favor to the child and its parents instead of to herself. People help each other with directions with an eagerness missing most places. When you tip people for doing nice things, you get extreme kindness back that you don't deserve or need. This all relates. Vancouver is not gay-friendly entirely or simply because it is a progressive city, though it is. Vancouver is more gay-friendly than New York City because New York City is simply not friendly. It is as welcoming of its gay community (well, in Manhattan and Brooklyn at least) as it is of the Hasidim, or whatever other community you might pick to compare. But Manhattan and Brooklyn are cities of struggle, in which gay and other communities are part of the tense striving and surviving. The warmth of Vancouver is hardly to be found in the brusqueness and functionality of the Village. Vancouver *as a whole* is proud of Pride and of its LGBT community in a way New York, which is so wrapped up in its own image of itself as the-most-this-and-that and therefore-also-most-tolerant-city, is. Spend a week here and in the Village (I've spent more there in the last year), and you can't really argue the point.

Vancouver is also a city of great natural beauty. The downtown is fringed by Stanley Park, a green oasis on the edge of the ocean (well, the water that leads to Vancouver Island, and thencefrom to the open Pacific). You can run or bike the seven mile or so perimeter of the park (a spectacular run comparable to Chicago's lake path, but nothing else I've had the pleasure to run). You can lose yourself on secluded, deeply forested paths that crisscross it. You can visit the exceptional Aquarium in it (ok, I never wanted to see a trainer attempt to cause a beluga [arctic whale] to urinate on cue before a crowd of humans, and was relieved the whale wouldn't cooperate), or the Stanley Park Teahouse, which sits over rocky cliffs and ocean. The city is so dense, and yet keeps faith with the old growth forest, as it looks out on forested mountains across the river, that give way to so much relatively pristine green receding to the north. It was a sensible place to site an Olympics, international in outlook, welcoming, beautiful, and with steep hills for crazy events like the luge.

Vancouver hit me at a time when I wanted some peace of mind. It gave me some respite from work and an arduous 2013 that I have not enjoyed very much. It reminded me that politeness isn't something empty that people hide behind, it's an important value that I care about a lot. In that way, it took me back to being a little boy, and remembering my real roots and who and what I really am. It reminded me of the possibility of great progress we humans have made toward a happily pluralistic world. It fed me very, very well. It welcomed and relaxed me. I love you, Vancouver. Better angels and all that. I miss you already. I'll be back, and I feel a bit more like me for having seen you. Thanks for that.

Articleman Defeats Sabato, Silver, in Presidential, Senate Predictions

Articleman — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 22:50:55 +0000

Hi all. Just wanted to say thank you for the dialogue in the blogs about the recently-concluded elections. It was an exciting and sometimes harrowing ride, through the conventions, the debates, and a strange Election Day and night.

While doing so, I thought it fair to point out that for the second cycle in a row, yours truly outpicked Larry Sabato and Nate Silver in the Senate races, and in this cycle, the Presidential as well.

As far as the Senate goes, in 2010, each of us missed on the re-elections of Senator Harry Reid in Nevada and Senator Michael Bennet in Colorado, but Messrs. Sabato and Silver also missed on the write-in re-election of Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, while I did not. In this cycle, both Sabato and Silver missed the election of Senator Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and the re-election of Senator Jon Tester in Montana. Yours truly missed North Dakota, but not Montana. Thus, I have missed three in the last two cycles, where they have missed five. (On the other hand, Nate not only picked the correct seat total in the House better than I did in 2010, but he also had fewer errors in his predictions. This is not the same thing; you could have the exact D-R split with no errors, or with errors that run in both directions equally often, and thus offset.)

At the Presidential level, Sabato predicted President Obama's re-election with 290 EVs, foreseeing that the President would lose both Virginia and Florida. Nate's superb model had the President winning re-election, and had the President showing ahead in Virginia, but his model predicted a tie in Florida, declining to pick either Obama or Romney there. I picked Obama to win Florida. Accordingly, I beat Nate (though in fairness, I read his stuff, and am of course influenced not only by the state polls, which are my primary focus, but also his excellent work, including in particular the trend analysis built into his model).

If you want to be an effective prognosticator, one of the most important things to understand is that in 2010 and in 2012, public polling averages understated Democratic performance. This was true in the Senate races in 2010 very notably, and was true again in the 2012 Senate and Presidential races. The polls are biased, as many in conservative media opined throughout the run-up to November 6. The art of prediction is largely looking at those averages, and compensating for the bias appropriately.

McCain Loses Hastily Convened Fourth Presidential Debate With Lifesize Cardboard Obama

Articleman — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:38:44 +0000

In a Manhattan conference room this afternoon, Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz.) conducted and lost a hastily arranged rematch of last night's Presidential debate, this time to a cardboard cutout of the Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama (D.-Ill.). According to CNN snap polls following this impromptu affair, McCain turned in more respectable numbers, losing by a narrow 50-45 margin to the cardboard image of the actual man who had trounced him in a debate just the night before, 58-31. The cardboard Obama was a life-size image of the junior Senator from Illinois purchased by McCain handlers for $40 at Nick's, a Fifth Avenue souvenir shop. Cardboard Obama depicts Barack Obama smiling and holding his glasses at his waist, and was placed behind the table at which McCain sat for the free-form, unmoderated debate.

As he did last night, McCain came out swinging. "John McCain was a man with nothing to lose. He was courageous in taking the fight to the very idea of Senator Obama throughout the first twenty minutes," said CNN analyst Alex Castellanos. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann agreed. "While I am not an admirer of Senator McCain's debating style, despite some lapses in fluency and answers to self-posed questions which awkwardly mixed subjects, it was clear in the early going that Senator McCain was ahead of his inanimate opponent on points." Early on, McCain used the timed intervals reserved for the camera to focus on his cardboard opponent to check his notes and prepare himself for his next question and answer, and appeared in command.

But it was to be an afternoon of surprises. "Cardboard Obama was a more formidable opponent than expected," stated a surprised David Gregory, also on MSNBC. "Like Barack Obama, Cardboard Obama was unflappable: while neither real Obama nor Cardboard Obama returned any of John McCain's withering criticism, by the half hour mark, both had seemed to get under McCain's skin." Agreeing with Gregory, conservative blogger John Hinderaker of PowerLine wrote, "McCain's success at channeling the anger of Joe Sixpack played well in the early going, but even this staunch McCainiac saw him unnerved by Cardboard Obama's passivity. McCain had no one to interrupt or chortle at, and was flustered and sputtering."

Focus groups monitoring the debate were split almost evenly, but the orange line measuring female response to the candidates in real time consistently rose to its highest level during each ninety second segment in which the camera was trained on the silent Cardboard Obama. Thomas McClarnan, an undecided Ohio voter, told CNN's Soledad O'Brien: "I really appreciated McCain's stance on taxes, and some of the parts where he wasn't yelling at the Cardboard Obama, but during the quiet parts, you know, where they weren't arguing and you've got Obama there smiling, I dunno, I just felt oddly reassured."

In the spin room afterward, McCain-Palin08 strategist Steve Schmidt crowed over the narrowness of Cardboard Obama's victory. "After three debates, we think John McCain has turned a corner. America may have been deceived by Obama's eloquence, and by greater margins each time, in the first three Presidential debates. But tonight, we saw the best of Senator McCain -- a man polls are telling us is now nearly as appealing to voters as a very attractive picture, by any reasonable measure, of Senator Obama. With eighteen days to build on this momentum, the real Barack Obama had better look out."

Reached in Obama's Chicago headquarters after the ersatz debate, Obama08 campaign manager David Plouffe had a different view: "We didn't know until it was too late that Senator McCain wanted to debate Barack again. We think that's great. Now that we know, we'll be proposing a debate every day until the conclusion of the election, but with two live candidates. In fact, we may propose that the debate be conducted continuously until the election concludes."

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