FunctionalAmbivalent

Valhalla By the Ohio

Well, who'da thunk it?

The U.S. Conference of Mayors has awarded Louisville first place in its annual city livability competition. Louisville won in the large-city category, beating out such competitors as Las Vegas, Seattle and Orlando, Fla.

The most livable city in thole U.S. of A.? Louisville is, of course, a wonderful place to live. Stop by sometime, but not this weekend because we've got plans.

The thing that's surprising to me about this that we won in the large-city category. First of all, I don't know why "large-city" is hyphenated, and I hyphenate almost everything. I'd have hyphenated "beating out," just for example, long before I'd hyphenate "large-city." But beyond that, I'm not sure Louisville's all that large. You can drive all the way across town in about 15 minutes and parking is always safe and convenient. My wife and I walked into a frou-frou French restaurant at 7:30 on a Friday night a couple of weeks ago and got a table without a reservation. You only need to get to the airport 45 minutes before your flight, for heaven's sake. How big can we be?

Another thing:

The other finalists included Albuquerque, N.M.; Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Fort Collins, Colo.; Kansas City, Mo.; Miami; Omaha, Neb.; Stamford, Conn.; Tampa, Fla., and Tulsa, Okla.

Better than Albuquerque, eh? Take that, NewMexiKen.

To visit the Louisville promotional web page, go here.

To visit the web page for Lynn's Paradise Cafe, the best breakfast joint in town, go here.

Proof, If Any Were Necessary, That Economic Education In Kentucky Lags

A local group here in Louisville has initiated a rolling boycott of gasoline brands, predicting they can bring gasoline prices down almost immediately.

People Involved Now -- or PIN -- started passing out flyers Monday calling for a two week rotating boycott. The boycott started Monday with Exxon Mobil and Chevron. It will then go to BP and ending up with Shell.

Organizers hope it will affect the profits of those companies and drive down prices.

"If we don't buy, they will have plenty of supply, said Mertus Strong, one of the boycott organizers.

Where to begin? How about: You dunderheads. Petroleum is a world market; buying gas across the street isn't going to change worldwide demand so it's not going to have an effect on anyones profits.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only way to effect the cost of gasoline is to consume less. That has both a short-term effect -- you use less gas and cut your cost immediately -- and a long-term effect: you decrease, by a few gallons a week, worldwide demand for petroleum.

I know, I know: there are endless pools of oil under Alaska and South Dakota and Brazil, and the only thing that's keeping us from nickel-a-gallon fuel is stupid liberals who hate America. Still, even if we kill all the liberals off tomorrow, it'll take years to get that oil flowing and people are whiny and bitchy about the cost right now -- and I, personally, think we need to do something to shut them up.

Which brings me back to using less fuel, which is what Louisville's pamphleteers ought to be pamphleteering about. But they're not.

I feel the need, before my next pull-quote from the article about PIN, to point out that I'm not making this up.

PIN says if the boycott doesn't drive down prices by the Fourth of July, it will start over again and this time freeze out the oil company stations for three week periods.

Oh yeah; that'll teach those worldwide markets who's boss.

I Guess I Have Some Kind of Obligation To Comment

The Kentucky primary is today, and since I live here and all...

The thing is, there's not much to say. It's been a trusty a Republican state ever since Democrats got on board with integration. Louisville is still fighting the busing battle of the 1970s, with public meetings every week on the new "student assignment plan" being drafted in response to a Federal Court's ruling that the long-standing school busing plan is discriminatory. There are broad tracts of the state where no one would even consider voting for a black guy.

Kentucky's rejection of Barack Obama is more than racial. This is a conservative state. It's not much on newfangled stuff like gay marriage and beer sales on Sundays. It's a state where resentments play a key role in politics, that reacts predictably to the kind of low-blow attacks that were part of politics in Kentucky long before Karl Rove planted his first slander with a friendly reporter. It's a generally insular state. I used to do advertising for a small college in the southern part of the Commonwealth, a place where 90% of students were the first members of their family to study past high school. For those students, Louisville was an almost impossibly glamorous big city, two hours drive away. I met more than one who was looking forward to their first trip there.

The surest path to victory is to paint the other guy as different. It works like magic. The last time the mentally faltering Jim Bunning defended his Senate seat, he sent out surrogates to imply that his opponent was gay. It worked, as the economically depressed outback reinstalled a Senator whose primary campaign promise was doing nothing meaningful to help them.  A smooth, big-city lawyer like Obama would have an uphill climb even if he was white.

The thing is, in every state Obama has started out far behind and gained ground, the only question being whether he would overtake Hillary Clinton before election day. Kentucky's seen as a gimme for Hillary, and it likely is. But there's a lot of this state that fits Obama's gaffe in Pennsylvania: bitter, manipulable, cynical about politics. They've been promised and promised, and not much has happened. Obama clearly is trying to break through to those people, and whether he does or not is a complicated calculation. But on the ground here in Kentucky, there are reasons to believe he might.

I was at a party a couple of weeks ago with a bunch of older people from an hour or so outside of Louisville. (There are places where "an hour or so" means suburbs. In Louisville, the suburbs end 15 minutes from downtown.) They weren't displaced factory workers or anything; it was a medical school graduation party, and the crowd was generally educated and relatively affluent. But they were also older and country, aunts and uncles and friends of the graduate's family. As the keg ran dry the conversation turned to politics. In that crowd of maybe 20 people, there were three who'd volunteered for Obama's campaign. They'd walked neighborhoods in and around Bardstown, and were going to canvas again before today's primary. These weren't college kids; they were grown ups within sight of retirement.

I eavesdropped on their conversations, and what was interesting to me was not the passion of the true believers, but the interest of the others. They seemed to want to know about Obama, to get some insight into what he was about. They didn't reject him out of hand. They were curious.

"AIDA" is the marketing term: attention, interest, desire, action. That's the sales process in a single acronym, and the hardest part of that equation is attention and interest. Get people there, to interest, and a good salesman can close the deal. These people were interested, and they were exactly the kind of people who, according to the conventional wisdom, Obama hasn't got a prayer with.

It wouldn't surprise me if the Kentucky vote is marginally closer, today, than the pundits predict. Obama won't win, but he'll show signs of strength in surprising places. What that means, in Kentucky, isn't that much. But what it means in other places, places that have less of a racial history but lots of the same frustrations, could be interesting, come the general.

Derby 2008

My Derby Betting Strategy

As you no doubt recall, I'm going to the Derby this year as part of a business function, which means that my misbehavior will be limited to relatively tame corporate forms: signing contracts in pencil, calling the receptionist "honey" and going a couple of days wihtout picking up my voice mail.

So, to add value to the event and keep myself from dying of boredom, I'm arranging a Derby pool that will give people, for $5 or so, a stake in the race. The pool will be built around a series of trifecta bets, which is picking the first, second and third place horses -- win, place and show -- in order. I'll also hedge my big bet by placing a smaller exacta bet.

There are 20 horses running in the Derby. I'm going to pick the ten I think most likely to finish in the front of the pack, and then out of that ten I'll pick the four most likely to win. Out of this raw material, I will construct a variety of trifecta wheels and boxes.

A trifecta wheel is picking a horse you think will win, and then combining that winner with possible place and show horses. For example, wheeling the 3, 9 and 12 horses would actually be two trifecta bets: 3, 9 and 12, and 3, 12, and 9. "Boxing" covers all possible combinations, and boxing the same three horses would actually comprise six bets: 3, 9, 12 -- 3, 12, 9-- 9, 3, 12 -- 9, 12, 3 -- 12, 9, 3 -- 12, 3, 9.

Trifecta bets pay a lot of money because they're really hard to pick. In 2005, when longshot Giacomo won the Derby, the trifecta paid $133,000. On the low end of the scale, when Silver Charm won in 1997 the payout was just over $200. The average Derby trifecta pays out a few thousand dollars.

So I'm picking my ten horses and constructing four wheels, taking the four horses I think most likely to win and wheeling nine others around them. Then I'm doing an exacta box (win and show, in order) of the four I think most likely to win. All-in, on behalf of the pool I'll bet about $100, and then sell twenty $5 shares to business associates attending their first horse race. This will make it possible for them to bet without having to make actual decisions. Everyone can feel involved with the races even though they don't know anything about betting on horses.

Here's the problem with this kind of betting: It almost never works. First of all, as extensive as it is, it's not extensive enough. I'm covering only four possible winners and six possible place and show horses. Unfortunately, there's always some totally unpredictable, 50-to-1 horse who sneaks in to finish near the front. So if you want to construct a wheel or box that takes into account that oddball horse, you have to add horses to the wheel and box, and when you start doing that costs escalate faster than geometrically, though not quite exponentially. A three-horse, $2 trifecta box costs $12. A four horse box costs $24. A five horse box costs $120. Betting seven of the 20 Derby horses would cost $672.  Before you know it, you're betting more than you can possibly win.

The right way to do this is to wheel or box one of those astronomical payoff bets -- Superfecta (first four finishers, in order) or Pick 6 (the winners of six consecutive races). Hitting one of those bets is like hitting the lottery and gives you the payoff you need to cover a huge number of combinations. I know some people who cashed a $400,000 Pic 6 ticket, for example, but I don't think it would be a good career management to gamble on that scale with a bunch of business associates who've never been to the track.

As for my own, personal bets -- well, I haven't figured those out yet. Derby horses are barely three years old and don't have a real long history. They haven't run many races, and those they have run are shorter than the Derby's one-and-a-quarter miles. My standard betting methodology -- looking at the record over the past couple of seasons, looking for horses who've finished strong in races of similar distance, looking for horses that have done well at Churchill Downs in the past -- is useless. So I'll probably just bet on a good horse going off with medium odds, and that horse will trip coming out of the gate and come in last by a staggering (literally) 35 lengths. I'll get to keep the betting ticket as a souvenir. "Look," I'll say, pulling the ticket from my wallet, "I had money on the loser."

Then I'll show them the John Kerry bumper sticker on my car.

Derby Preview: YouTube Infield

The infield at Churchill Downs on Derby Day is famous for a depravity. Fortunately, in the age of YouTube, it's possible to share in that depravity without having to experience it's smells.

The day starts out with innocent fun: Porta -Potty racing:

There's lots to see in the infield, including dildo races.

But as time passes, things deteriorate. You can tell this is late in the day because the trash can is overflowing with beer cans.

One of the biggest problems in the infield is there's no place for complete strangers to have drunken, regretable sex.

The emergence of completely senseless behavior. In this case, the Dumpster Tackle.

One of the great things about Derby is the southern belles, dressed in their festive spring best, lying helpless and degraded in the mud.

Tourists posing for pictures next to one of Derby's prominent attractions: a vomiting guy.

There is, of course, the race. You can see part of it from behind the barbed wire.

Derby Week Schedule: Monday Through Friday

For those of you visiting for Derby, here's a schedule of this week's events:

Monday -- The Great Bed Race. Teams from various banks and insurance companies put women on tricked-out, wheeled beds and push them through the streets of downtown Louisville, accompanied by laughter and local TV crews. Elsewhere in town, people start laying-in supplies of bourbon and going out into the garden to make sure that the mint is growing. If you haven't got your hat yet, you're pretty much out of luck. All that's left is purple.

Tuesday -- The American Founders Bank Derby Festival Winefest, threatening "Kentucky's finest wines." If you've got any questions about why bourbon is the official drink of the Kentucky Derby, this wine festival should answer them. Also, for those who would rather watch than participate in a wine-related event, there's the Run for the Rose', a contest in which waiters and waitresses demonstrate how fast they can get drinks to your table. This is an event of real merit. The winner gets a 30% tip.

Wednesday -- The Great Steamboat Race. In this entirely rigged event, the Belle of Louisville and the Belle of Cincinnati face off in a death match that will be won by last year's loser, no matter who crosses the finish line first. Don't ask; that's just how it works. The steamboats start downtown, chug slowly upstream to Six Mile Island, turn around, and lumber back down. The banks of the river will be lined with tens of thousands of mostly drunk people, barely noticing the boats passing by. The boats themselves will be loaded with festively-dressed revelers, most of whom settled for steamboat tickets when they couldn't get seats for Derby.The two hour race is a vivid demonstration of why steamboats aren't seen very much anymore, since similar boats powered by internal combustion take about ten minutes to make the same trip. The prize is a rack of antlers, spray-painted gold.

Thursday -- In continuing with Derby's tradition of corporate sponsorship, the Republic Bank Pegasus Parade blocks traffic downtown for no good reason except to give corporate sponsors an excuse to parade promotional floats right up the middle of Broadway. This year, for the first time in memory, the Grand Marshall is not Willard Scott. It is, in fact, celebrity chef Bobby Flay, whose ubiquity at Derby is turning him into the Meat Loaf of the new millennium. Thursday is also "Louisville's Day At the Track," the day closest to Derby when all the tickets haven't been auctioned off to rich people from far away. Louisvillians take the day off of work to drink and gamble before the Eurotrash rabble arrives. Private jet parking will be in short supply at all three of the area's airports, and I've got one friend over by Bowman Field who makes his annual nut selling jet parking space on his front lawn to people who don't have on-field parking reserved in advance. He can pack a dozen Gulfstreams into his yard and if you duke him an extra twenty, he'll spray your fuselage down with a garden hose.

Friday -- Friday is Oaks Day, The Oaks being a huge, Derby-esque race for fillies, which are girl horses. The Oaks used to be the day Louisville went to the track, but it's such a big deal now that locals are barely allowed. Also on Friday are all the big Derby parties, many of which are affiliated with charities in order to give their depravity a sense of purpose. (No one has ever conducted a study, but I'm guessing the amount of bikini waxing that goes on in Louisville the Friday before Derby is enormous.) The most famous of Derby parties is the Barnstable-Brown event, which takes place in a big house across the street from Cherokee Park. Barnstable and Brown are twin blond hotties-gone-to-seed, former Doublemint Twins, in fact, and every year they invite the entire B-List of celebrities over and then charge regular people a couple of hundred bucks to come in and gawk. It's an uncomfortable event for all involved, and while I can't say for sure that Bobby Flay's going to be there, it's a good bet. Kid Rock will be, for sure, and when the question comes up the answer will be, "Why, yes, that is Meat Loaf over by the buffet." Tickets to the party are often described as "hard to get," but I just Googled the event and found several dozen for sale at face value. If you want to go, I'd wait until the price drops down to 50% of face. The fame of the Barnstable-Brown Party is a lesson in media laziness. It doesn't have the best celebrities and is far from being the best party in town. It's farther still, in fact, from being the most socially elevated, since really classy people don't want to run a gauntlet of tabloid TV crews to get into a party where they're likely to have a drunken confrontation with Larry Birkhead. Barnstable-Brown's prominence derives from its obviousness. The media-bots who come into Louisville for Derby are mostly interested in filing their stories quickly so they can get drunk and laid like everyone else. While the really good parties don't invite camera crews in at all, the Barnstable-Brown publicist -- who works year-round on the event -- will provide limo service to anyone with a pro-grade camera.

NEXT: The Big Day
 

You've Got To Admit, It'd Make a Striking T-Shirt

The Legislature of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, having solved all of the state's major problems, is on the verge of passing a law honoring Colonel Harlan Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken and year-round devotee of white linen suits. The animal rights group PETA objects, since the chickens KFC sells have been killed in a less-than-delightful way, and has issued the following snappy quote:

"If the state legislature moves forward with this one, then they should change Kentucky's state bird from the cardinal to the debeaked, crippled, scalded, diseased, dead chicken."

The dominant disagreement in Kentucky is not as much about politics or even chicken cruelty so much as it is about basketball, which is the topic of sports radio acrimony year round. The key dispute is between fans of the University of Kentucky Wildcats and the University of Louisville Cardinals.

Anyway, I'm guessing there are Wildcat fans who would support any legislation that converted U of L's Cardinal into something diseased and dead.

In Which I Visit the Heartland and Am, Once Again, Appalled

Sometimes when I'm traveling on business I just can't bring myself to eat dinner alone in a restaurant. On those nights, I buy simple food at a market and a bottle of wine at a liquor store and eat and drink in my hotel room.

So tonight I'm in one of those mid-sized cities where the Chamber of Commerce always looks at the bright side, right in mid-America. Having something of a history of discomfort in chain "concepts," and with no sign of local flavor to be seen, I decided to cruise the commercial strip in search of wine and a market. The strip I headed down was the traffic-clogged dividing line between gated communities and downtrodden 30-year old apartment sprawl.

I found a liquor store in a stripmall, parked out front, and approached the door. A dirty, emaciated man came out, held the door for me, and smiled a brown smile. I nodded a thank you for his courtesy and went in.

The liquor store was small, the wine selection inexpensive and colorfully branded. I was the only customer. The place was manned by a big, burly truck-drivin' sort of guy and a hard-looking little woman with stiff, artificially dark hair. The woman was looking at a shelf.

"I think the sonovabitch took it," she said, her voice slightly slurred.

There was a pause. I tried to be inconspicuous, going to the nearest bottles and picking an Australian that looked like it wouldn't kill me. I'm capable of spending hours in a decent wine store; this choice took 30 seconds. I headed toward the counter.

"I'm telling you," the woman continued. "There's one missing. The sonovabitch."

The counter had two cash registers. I stepped up to the closest one. The man stayed leaned against the far end of the counter, silently gazing out the window.

"Shit!" the woman blurted. "That sonovabitch!" She ran out the door.

The man stepped up to the cash register farthest away from me, still without speaking. After an uncomfortable few seconds I moved down and put my bottle in front of him. He rang it up without saying anything. The woman came back in.

"He's halfway across the fucking parking lot," she said. "I know he took one."

The man handed me my wine. I said "thank you" and headed for the door.

"I see that asshole in here again I'm gonna break his neck," the woman said.

The man went back to his position at the end of the counter, staring out the window.

I went out the door, got in my car, and decided to get a pizza delivered to my hotel room.

Forget I Even Mentioned It

For the last couple of days I've been feeling an obligation to write about the Supreme Court decision regarding Louisville's school desegregation plan. It's the kind of thing I should write about, a local story that I have an advantage on, that I can write about and maybe get picked up by the big blogs and boost my meager traffic. The thinktank pundit class may have the book learnin', as we say here in Kentucky, but I exist in the real world. My kids are students in the Jefferson County Public Schools, about which the Supreme Court recently opined.

A key element of the desegregation program here is the development of magnet schools that excel in something or the other and use that excellence to attract white students from the suburbs to the inner city. My older boy applied for one of those magnet programs, was put on a waiting list but didn't get in. We didn't really think of it at the time, because applying to schools and not getting in is a fact of life here starting in 6th grade, but he probably didn't get in in part because of his race. While the goal of the magnet schools is to attract white kids to the city, the district doesn't let the magnet schools become exclusively white islands.

Being functionally ambivalent has its advantages, one of which is that when your kid is turned down for a school because of his race you shrug your shoulders and go on with life. I, personally, believe that racial diversity has its advantages, and that may mean that I, personally, may not get everything I want in the world. Oh, well. As it turned out, he had a wonderful experience in another school that didn't involve a couple of hours a day on buses, and we're without regrets. But the experience was what it was: just the sort of institutionalized racial discrimination the court seeks to eliminate. (The Louisville case actually originated with African American parents.)

All of that said, it seems to me there's a level of panic about this decision that is out of proportion with the changes it is likely to bring. That panic is prevalent among the old-time Civil Rights crowd, the people who remember when discrimination, in Louisville, was blatant and pervasive. They're all over the place talking about the end of Brown vs. the Board of Education, postulating a return to segregated schools.

That's pretty much hogwash, as far as I can tell, because it's not just the schools that have integrated in the last 40 years. It would be hard to plop-down a non-gerrymandered district in Louisville without included some minorities. You could probably do it in the far east and west sides, but it would take some work. Plus there aren't many people around who would accept the kind of discrimination that was the rule 40 years ago, and if it started to crop up again the outrage would be nearly universal.

There's also this: Most of the people who are afraid of African Americans have already taken their kids out of the Jefferson County Schools. They've moved to one of the surrounding counties or they've installed their kids in the exclusive private schools. They're not, for all practical purposes, players in this drama.

One of the reasons I've not written about this is that I don't know enough about it to write intelligently. I'm just a parent -- mildly disinterested, concerned perhaps too much with other things than my children's education. I go to meetings and school orientation and teacher conferences, and I'm infuriated every time I do because the public schools are the biggest, most dysfunctional committee in the world. But I also went to my son's graduation ceremony this year and saw the families in their finest attire celebrating a high school graduation. What is, in my family, a milestone barely worth noting is, in too many families, a major achievement. White or black, Kentucky doesn't have much of a heritage of cherishing education. A lot of those kids marching up the aisle were having their last educational experience, and that strikes me as more of a problem than anything the Supreme Court is likely to say.

As a parent, I worry about other things than the racial makeup of the schools. Maybe I'm wrong to feel that way. Maybe I take for granted that integration is forever. But when I think about the schools I'm concerned that there are teachers who shouldn't be teaching and a money-sucking bureaucracy that should be pared down to the bone. I'm worried that my kid's teachers have to spend their own money for classroom supplies and that too many days every year are spent teaching crap that the liberal educational establishment find of value, things like conflict resolution and consumerism. It seems like my children spend an awful lot of time studying for government-mandated tests and not enough time learning how to write a coherent sentence.

There are those who see the Louisville decision as the end of school integration, and from where I'm standing they're nothing but a bunch of hysterics. Looking back, they're no more hysterical than those who saw school integration as the end of Western Civilization, and who moved to the lily-white country or spend themselves into the poorhouse to keep their kids in lily white private schools. But they're hysterical nonetheless.

In the middle ground, where families like mine just try to muddle through the day, I wish everyone would stop worrying about the Supreme Court and get back to worrying about stuff that matters. This is one of those issues that's going to involve lots of swings of the pendulum. Maintaining a program that was developed a long time ago for a set of circumstances that no longer exist would have been ridiculous, so the court moved us forward into territory that is by definition unknown. We will no doubt find ourselves, 40 years from now, in another untenable position, and the courts or someone else will have to step in and knock us over the brink again. That's how society works. We try, we fall short, we try again.

So I'm not really sure what I have to contribute to the dialog. Maybe I won't write about the decision after all.