A.  Her being reprimanded for abusing her power as Alaska governor after holding that office less than two years?
B.  Her view of herself as on a divine mission from a fundamentalist god?
C.  Her unabashed whipping crowds into a frenzy by repeatedly chanting that Obama is a terrorist?

I’m going with D.  When John McCain asked her to be Vice President, she boasts, “I didn’t blink.”

Watching Palin in the VP debate with Joe Biden, I had a strong gut reaction I couldn’t explain: sheer terror at what might happen if this person were President — if McCain (AKA “Other foot on a banana peel”) were elected and anything happened to him.  Today, however, I understand why I was and am so frightened.

I would expect a person who understood the seriousness of the job to “blink” indeed — to pause to think about it, and to ask herself, “Could I be ready in Jan 2009 to potentially serve as the leader of the free world?”  Palin seems proud of the fact that she did not pause to think, even for a moment, and to wonder if she were indeed up to the enormous responsibility being VP would entail.  Her naive pride makes me quake in my shoes.

Here’s why I’m so scared.  In 1999, researchers at Cornell experimentally confirmed what I had long suspected — that the worse people perform at a task, the more likely they are to overestimate their competence.  It gets worse: not only do incompetent people overestimate their level of skills, but also the worse someone is at a skill, the more grossly she overestimates her own ability at it.

The New York Times reported the on this experiment shortly after it was published [link below].  It used two complex tasks: a test of recognizing grammatically correct standard English, and a test of recognizing what was funny, for which subjects rated the humorousness of thirty jokes on a scale of one to eleven.  (The jokes had been rated by a panel of comedians which included Al Franken).

Then subjects estimated by percentile how competent they thought they were at each skill.

The researchers found that people whose competence was below the 60th percentile would overestimate their performance  — and the further their scores below the 60th percentile, the more grossly they would overestimate their skills, to the point where “bottom-quartile participants were nearly 4 times more miscalibrated than their top-quartile counterparts” (page 1131).

Why?  Because, unsurprisingly, the skills necessary for competence are also necessary to recognize and rate competence.  (The researchers also list many previous studies that also suggest this conclusion).
People whose performance rated at above  the 70th percentile, however, would err in the opposite direction: they would tend to underestimate their own performance, and the higher they ranked, the more severely they would underestimate it.

Both these findings matched what I have observed in my years of teaching writing: While strong performers are uniformly  modest in their self-assessments — I can’t count the number of really talented writers I’ve met who have told me, “I know I need to work on my writing” — the ones with the lowest scores are the ones most willing to tramp into my office demanding to know why their essays were awarded a D [a question whose only truly honest answer would be, "Because I was feeling generous that day."]

So no wonder the fact that Palin would so blithely offer that she “didn’t blink,” as if that somehow qualified her for the leadership of the free world, scares me to death.  Her apparently baseless confidence signals to me that she doesn’t understand what a huge task being Vice President would be — and is clueless that intellectually she simply may not be up to it.

The NYTimes covered this experiment.

Original article: Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning.  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own
Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999), Vol. 77, No. 6. pages 1121-1134.  <http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf>

Salma passed her dissertation defense! Congratulations!

When something’s on sale at the grocery store, it’s old. Expired. The opposite of fresh. That’s why it’s on sale. Check it out next time. Ribeye for 3.99 a pound? That’s last week’s ribeye. Look at it closely. A little grey, isn’t it? Best if sold by yesterday? Let me tell you, you gotta pay attention to this stuff.

Before Christmas break, Pulao and I bought some sale rice. The first time we had it, Pulao said it tasted bad. “It’s a little bitter,” she said. Ha! I scoffed. It tasted fine to me. We ate it again. “I don’t like this rice,” she said. The Princess and the pea, I thought. After the second time, Pulao bought some new rice, but I didn’t throw out the old. It’s fine!

Then we came back after ten days holiday vacation to find that our glass rice jar with the old rice, sealed tight, had six to seven buggy things in it. Kind of like little moths, or little cockroaches. Trapped in the jar, they seemed to be mostly dead. There was webby mossy stuff trailing from rice to bugs, and two bugs appeared to be joined at the butt. Went out with a bang, I guess. These bugs had time enough to be born, go through an awkward adolescence, hook up, and die – all while living inside our sale rice.

Pulao is classy, I’ve decided. With a true discerning taste. She is now also my official food taster, who I have asked to vet all my meals and drinks for twinges of buggy bitterness, so I will, in the future, not happily eat thousands and thousands of weevil larva.

Last Monday night, Pulao and I hit the first-ever Triple Rock Social Club Pub Trivia Night with some friends. A good time was had by all. Well, I can only be certain of myself, but many other people exhibited warning signs of fun-having.

We were on the only team I saw to gather the max of six people, we knew one of the hosts, and there was a question about Harry Potter, but we still didn’t win. Life is unfair.

There was a music round, a picture round, and a taste round; the taste round was a small piece of Turkish delight, infused with a flavor you had to guess (rose syrup; thanks, Pulao!). The winners got a bar tab and tickets to some shows and the eternal glory that is trivial victory in front of friends.

Although all six of us knew the answer to a TV question about The Office without using any brain cells (Dwight Shrute’s farm? Beets. I mean, come on), none of us could name the current UN Secretary General (Ban Ki-moon), no matter how hard we scrunched up our foreheads and pretended that it was on the tips of our tongues. This is why I don’t publish my last name on this thing. But at least you know you don’t have to be well-informed to take home fourth place. Woo-hoo!

Pulao and I were playing around beforehand, asking each other questions we thought up on the spot, and I could think of nothing whatsoever outside of funny character names in American literature. This was random, even trivial, you might say, but I thought I would test the illustrious 12apostrophes readership on their funny-character-name knowledge.

See if you can place these characters safely inside their respective books:

1. Stamp Paid
2. Kilgore Trout
3. Sal Paradise
4. Honey
5. Happy
6. Quentin Compson
7. Ras the Exhorter
8. Dr. Hilarious
9. Esme Squalor
10. The Dauphin
11. Major Major Major Major

Answers (click your mouse and roll over the grayed text to read it):

1.

Beloved – Toni Morrison

2.

He shows up in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, Bluebeard, and Timequake, all by Kurt Vonnegut

3.

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

4.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Edward Albee

5.

Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

6.

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

7.

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

8.

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

9.

A Series of Unfortunate Events – Lemony Snicket (First seen in The Ersatz Elevator)

10.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

11.

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

I washed my cell phone the other day by submerging it in a tub of scalding, soapy dishwater, and it came out squeaky clean.

My downfall is that I don’t have a watch. Sans watch, I grab my phone to check the time. Friday night, with my right hand, I was trying to fill a pot full of water from the tap to cook some green beans. With my left hand, I was trying to check the cell phone. I should really know better than to tax my brain to attempt two tasks at the same time.

The result was pretty predictable. The pot in my right hand began to sag with the weight of the water, and my lighting-quick reflexes decided that, if it was a choice between saving my cell phone from falling into a bucket of hot dishwater, or saving the pot of water form spilling, by God, I wasn’t going to spill a single drop of that water!

Once that little peanut of logic in my frontal lobe noted that the cell phone in the dishwater was a priority of an entirely higher order, I cavalierly dropped my pot of green-bean water and scalded both hands blindly fishing my phone out of the dishtub.

The true miracle is, my phone survived. Not at first, of course. It was completely dead at first. But I learned a trick from my brother, who has soaked two different digital cameras at two different amusement parks, and saved them both; unscrew everything you can and let it dry out for a couple of days.

Voila! It wasn’t up to snuff immediately, though. After 24 hours of drying, the phone dialed the number six, ghost-like, as a single long tone whenever I flipped it open.

Six is speed dial for my Mom and Dad, so I almost called them about 12 times on Sunday. God, probably, was trying to give me a hint about filial duty and Honoring Thy Ma and Pa and what-not, but he gave up on me as a lost cause pretty quick, as, after 48 hours of drying, the six key fixed itself. All right!

Man, I should really call my parents . . .

I love giving quizzes in my writing/literature classes. I find that the less time people have to think, the funnier their writing tends to be. Snippets:

I am very obstinate. And I don’t always like to change my opinion…

As opposed to the more common breed of obstinacy that is dying to change.

The color in this ad is very vibrant and alive. It makes the reader feel calm and serene.

The only explanation I have is that the colors at first energize you so much that you feel alive, but the effort that goes into being alive exhausts you and eventually calms you down.

We cannot censor speech until we censor the words that come out of our mouths.

Infallible logic.

I hate writing. I would much rather use words.

It’s true! Writing without words has always been puzzlingly difficult for me as well.

Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to show Africa had a rational past. African was not a wild ferret.

I have to say, I was stumped by this one. Africa, latest studies have shown, is in fact NOT a wild ferret, and might never have been.

Verbal responses can be equally funny—sometimes more so since students process their thoughts even less. For instance, once this student raised her hand after I’d given about a 15 minute lecture on history and relevance of the Berlin Wall. Her question was, “So is the Berlin Wall the same thing as the Great Wall of China?”

Days like that, I’m proud to be a teacher.

This morning, I’m waiting for my advisor to send me my PhD preliminary exam questions, and as I wait, I thought I’d show

a) 4 ways how taking the preliminary exams is like having sex for the first time:

1. There’s a divide between people who’ve gone through with it and those who haven’t. All the advice that the experienced can give you is to “close your eyes and barrel your way through it.”
2. Before, your entire identity can be summed up as someone hasn’t gone through it. On the other side of the fence, people say it’s now just something they did.
3. Every now and then, you come across someone who’s experience was magical. They were fully prepared, had everything sorted out, knew exactly what to expect, and might have even had fun. For most people, it seems to have been torture while they were doing it, but at least went by very quickly.
4. You think you want to be on the other side– very, very badly. When the time is actually close, and the moment is inevitable, you suddenly wish you had just a little while longer.

b) 1 important way that taking the exams is NOT like having sex

1. You try to do it just once in your life.