All your dreams? They can come true!

Workers in Britain have found the skeleton of a Roman gladiator who was — wait for it — ‘stabbed six times and thrown out with the rubbish.’

As you may know, Ed Koch, New York’s straightest living ex-mayor, has an email list and he regularly reviews movies. “You may enjoy the movie, but I was disappointed. It intended to unite the ballet with a Freudian or Havelock Ellis spin that would satisfy the audiences’ expectation of great art and its carnal desires. Neither worked, at least not for me…. I hope I will not be thought of as a coarse Philistine for not praising this film. I confess that I am not a devotee of the ballet; indeed, I have attended only a few performances. I once appeared on stage reading the narration of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ which I enjoyed a lot, and I also loved the move ‘The Red Shoes.’ I would have preferred if ‘Black Swan’ had included more dancing or more Freud, but there wasn’t enough of either to engulf the senses.”

(BTW, in case you didn’t know, everyone stopped returning your emails and calls because they’re all watching Bernie Sanders filibuster on C-Span 2.)

In the light of this week’s controversy over whether or not coffee makes you smarter, Jonah Lehrer’s “The Truth Wears Off” in the New Yorker seems particularly well-timed. (Lehrer discussed this in-depth here last night.) His topic is the “decline effect,” in which the positive results of an experiment are less and less able to be replicated over time, and he paints a picture of the scientific community as a self-reenforcing echo chamber. Like FOX News, sort of. Not because they’re terrible people, scientists (or because they’re all Democrats!) but just because they are people. And people like to be proven right, not wrong. And also studies showing results that prove or bolster a groundbreaking discovery are much more likely to be published than those that show inconclusive results.

Australian biologist Michael Jennions tells Lehrer:

“This is a very sensitive issue for scientists. You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends, you become a little more skeptical of things.”

I’ll say. Who are we supposed to trust if we can’t trust science? Skepticism is healthy, for sure. But really, in some areas, we — or, I should say, I — don’t need any more of it. I’m not looking for a single over-arching theory of the universe. (Not that I’d mind it, I suppose, if it were to occur to me. Or if a more intelligent alien beamed it into my brain from space.) I don’t need hundred-percent, guaranteed answers to all the big questions. I’m just looking for some guidance in going about my day-to-day. I look to science, and people who know much more about it than I do, for that. The caffeine thing is a perfect example. I probably don’t need more than a single cup of coffee to wake myself up in the morning, and I don’t need to be any more jittery and nervous than I already am, but when it comes to being smarter, I could definitely use all the help I can get.

These days, though, the more science we get (and we sure get a lot of it these days, huh? Living as we do in the information age) the more fickle and shifty it seems. Trying to know what we’re supposed to eat or drink or not eat or drink or otherwise do or not do to keep ourselves healthy, this has seemed like a fool’s endeavor for years now. The accepted truth keeps changing so fast. Avocados, good or bad? How about eggs? What are the three different types of cholesterol again? I can’t keep up, but I try my best to do what my doctor tells me. (It was hard enough to find a doctor, which I finally did earlier this year, they way they move around and drop out of people’s more gainfully employed wives’ health plans and whatnot, and the way that people’s more gainfully employed wives’ companies switch health plans from time to time. This world.)

Of course, a doctors’ advice is usually based on what he or she has read or skimmed in the latest or slightly less latest medical journals (or what drug salespeople have most recently told him). And unfortunately, Lehrer writes, “In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics, but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants.”

Sure enough. My doctor prescribed me Vitamin D pills earlier this year, due to my having an apparently less-than-optimal amount of Vitamin D in my blood. Not three months later, the newspaper tells me to stop. Vitamin D pills have been proven unnecessary and might actually be harmful, it says. So I stop. For now, I guess. I haven’t called the doctor to see what she says about it. But, Jeez, I hadn’t gotten through half the bottle.

And I’d say that over a span of twenty years, I have been told the following by dental hygienists:

1) You should brush your teeth three times a day, once after every meal.
2) You should brush your teeth twice, once in the morning, once before going to bed.
3) You really should only brush your teeth once, before going to bed.
4) You should brush twice a day with an electric toothbrush
5) You should only brush once a day with an electric toothbrush, and use a regular tooth brush the other time.
6) You should brush your teeth in the little circle patterns where each tooth meets the gum.
7) The idea is to get the toothbrush bristles down underneath the gum, so you should hold the toothbrush at a 45-degree angle, to slide the Bristol in between.
8) No. You should just brush flat.
9) It’s not important to brush the tops of the back teeth.
10) You should brush the tops of the back teeth.
11) You should use the white mouth wash in the morning and the green mouthwash at night.
12) You should use the white mouthwash and the green mouth wash after every meal.
13) You should use the white mouthwash and the green mouthwash whenever you want, after anything you eat.
14) The pharmaceutical scientists are having so much success with the mouthwashes, that in twenty years, people aren’t going to have to even use toothbrushes regularly or go to the dentist as often. With its chemical advancements, the dental industry is basically making itself obsolete.

Who knows? I’m waiting for all my teeth to fall out at once, like I’ll leave them all in a crisp red apple in one unsuccessful bite, and then to go to the dentist’s office and have the dentist tell me, “Oh, you should never listen to anything a dental hygienist says.”

I used to not. For years, I didn’t go to the dentist or the doctor. When I was younger, I used to poo-poo science. I took a philosophy course in college with a professor who taught that much of the world’s problems could be traced back to the Cartesian split and the debasement of the physical world in favor of the intellectual one that followed, and how this gave license to man’s cutting everything he finds in half and then in half again, leading to science and Sir Francis Bacon’s desire to put nature on the rack and “torture her for her secrets” and all that. This violated the all-important oneness I had learned about in an Eastern philosophy class I had taken the semester before. (Being a philosophy major in college is a fine, ridiculous thing to do.)

So I was anti-science for a while, believing that it was all based on a lie that was keeping us from realizing a greater truth. “Maya,” we called it at the ashram, the “illusion” of the separateness of things. Just kidding. I never actually spent time in an ashram. Though I did stubbornly suffer too many headaches, refusing to take an aspirin. (The “natural” medicinal properties of marijuana only sometimes helped in this regard.)

I used to smoke cigarettes, too. A pack a day, for four years. I did this in full knowledge of the risk associated. My father died of lung cancer shortly after I started. It was part nihilism. (And in my most melodramatic internal analysis, an extended suicide attempt.) But also, it was what I saw as a life-affirming sort of hedonism that came from a healthy acceptance of the extent to which we don’t have any control over our fate. I could have an aneurism tomorrow; a piece of an airplane’s landing gear could fall off mid-flight and flatten me on my way to the store — smoke ’em if you got ’em. It was a way of dealing with fear, this thinking, an effective one, and I based (or excused) lots of behavior on it. I used to not wear seatbelts.

The biggest change in my thinking came, as it will, with the birth of my kid. It’s much less okay with me that I might die today, or tomorrow, or next week, than it used to be. (And let’s not even get into the matter of the kids’ health. That level of non-acceptance of the extent to which we don’t have any control over our fate isn’t good for anybody.)

But even before then, I’d come around on science, and empiricism in general. I’ve never believed in a god, and as I grew older, and came to a better understanding of Darwinism and the scientific method, it seemed more and more like the best guide to life. In the absence of faith, we amass the best information available, test it best we can and make our moves accordingly. Even if, considering Hume’s refutation of definitive causality, we can never be totally for sure that anything is going to work out the same way it has in the past.

In that way, seeing the embrace of uncertainty as science’s greatest selling point, I guess these ideas about decline effect don’t really change anything. Decline effect just demonstrates, as Lehrer puts it, “the slipperiness of empiricism.” And serves as a reminder that we should feel stupid and helpless and nervous and confused all the time. Or maybe I just drank too much coffee today. Or not enough?

Many of your fellow Awl readers would be delighted to drink with you this evening at the Ella Lounge, at 9 Avenue A, from 6 to 10 p.m. You look like you need a drink!

* By “on us,” of course we mean “mostly down our shirts.” Not like, as in “we’re paying for them”! That’s crazy.

While they are disproportionately a problem for tweenagers, social-networking narcissists, rappers, and people doing it real big up in the club, Haters are a problem that affects us all. Which makes it that much more surprising how few of us were even aware of the risk presented by haters, doubters and naysayers until just a few years ago. Many of us, indeed, went about our daily lives secure in the belief that people not intimately involved in our daily lives probably didn’t spare even a moment’s thought on our respective existences. Which, granted, is somewhat unconvincing if you think about it — I mean the idea that other people, between their jobs and love lives and DVR backlog and meals, do not have spare psychic energy to expend anticipating (if not, indeed, plotting) your failure; that they were too busy doing something with their own hands, like something for work or fixing their hair or wrapping a gift for a loved one, to be rubbing their palms together in glee at the prospect of your defeat; that they are too busy talking about themselves and their lives to say something cutting and nasty and totally unfair about you and yours. We now know that this is bullshit, of course. The contemporary question — one with which a great many of our more unbearable fellow citizens struggle in public every day and which the NFL’s strong discursive current of meaty, aggro paranoia can help us answer — is what to do with haters.

Motivation by real or imagined disrespect iis not new in sports (or the world). It has, in fact, been the preferred get-up-and-go strategy for highly productive assholes for generation. The unwillingness or inability to forget even the slightest of slights, among other things, is what gave us Michael Jordan, a dazzling and pathological icon of joyless mastery and as unloved a legend as any sport can boast. It has also given us any number of curdled, disordered leaders — Richard Nixon, pickled rotten in his own bile, comes to mind — and the millions of smaller despots out there grimly settling and re-settling grade-school scores in fluorescent-lit office parks, or maniacally luxe boardrooms, or from behind do-you-know-how-fast-you-were-going cop shades. Everyone knows at least one of America’s grudge farmers, and has hopefully figured out how to deal with the narcissism specific to this particular type of hypertrophic adolescent — as one of those very adolescents put it, in a song that later became part of a 35-minute, multimillion-dollar movie about himself, the answer is to run away as fast as-you-can.

Criticizing specific NFL players for Olympian self-absorption and corny tough-guy vanity is easy enough — I do it myself, actually, and I do it fairly often. But while nothing quite absolves Terrell Owens of his essential Terrellian Owensness, we should probably also apply a sliding scale here. From practice-squad anonymities on up, NFL players have spent much of their lives alternately lavished and savaged with an attention those of us watching on television will never know, and subjected to warping extremes of earned and unearned adulation and criticism. The armies of youngs crying and raging and gloating with obscure self-delight on YouTube or piling LOL-ily onto some hash tag or other are enough to make any self-respecting youngish curmudgeon wince him/herself comatose, but the kids have got their age as an excuse — it takes a long time to recognize that the rest of the world is not as concerned with you than you are, and so almost certainly less interested in what happened with Brianna at lunch or whatever. Prolonged exposure to the backwards, bugged-out priorities of big-time football postpones that realization, which is to all appearances about as unhelpful and unhealthy as it sounds.

Because it often seems as if the entirety of our mass culture is designed to more fulsomely and efficiently serve it, the surly self-importance of adolescence is uncomfortably familiar to anyone with a television or an internet. And while the kids are the ones who do this particular thing best and most authentically, the peevish entitlement and fuming vanity of a child alone at the center of the universe is everywhere to be found in our culture. Watch any television channel long enough, and you’ll see some petulant adult child, gone savage with self-esteem and self-regard, decrying imaginary outrages against their sanctified self with a toddler’s fury and a spooky middle-distance self-possession that suggests they’ve done all this before, a lot. That ESPN is among the places to find this display isn’t a shocker, really — we don’t traditionally look to our fastest-running, strongest-armed individuals for lessons on how best to live.

What we do look to our fastest and strongest and most uniquely named individuals for, though, is entertainment and a little vicarious transcendence. Every sport has its signature fantasy — basketball is for those of us who want to fly, golf is for those who aspire to a singular focus and precision and also hate taxes, mixed martial arts is for scary jerks. And while the NFL’s success has a lot to do with wholesale national failures of judgment and a love of violence and a lack of other good television on Sundays, it also owes a lot to an especially appealing foundational fantasy — football’s intimations of plain invincibility, and occasional fleeting actual instances of it, are intoxicating. There’s a simple and essential fun to watching Chris Johnson outrun an opponent, or Adrian Peterson run over an opponent, or Michael Vick make himself invisible to an opponent — they can do it, and we can’t.

There’s a certain testiness that comes with acknowledging these living on-field ideals as human and vulnerable and flawed — noticing that the personification of a nation’s idle but deeply felt fantasies also has a stupid haircut or refers to himself in the third person or some appalling off-season habits. I’m inclined to think this realization is healthy, but humans are also humans and great athletes can be vain, which means we get vanity runoff like Chad Johnson’s VH1 dating show and Brandon Lloyd’s rap career. If Tom Brady, who is a fashion model married to another fashion model and a multi-millionaire and recipient of innumerable gifts, wants to motivate himself by remembering that he was picked 199th in the 2000 NFL Draft — 134 picks after Hofstra quarterback Giovanni Carmazzi, for the record — then he can do that. It has worked great for him. It has worked great for a bunch of NFL players, and works with them still — mid-week NFL stories are rife with individual players snarling reflexively at unnamed doubters and haters, with teams determined to dedicate this next win to everyone who thought they’d lose.

That’s always true, but it seems especially so as the season drags into its final stretch — grudges planted and cultivated during the early season are bearing fruit, but this is also the time when motivation is hardest to come by. I imagine a constellation of these doubters blinking away above each player’s head — a pathological dad or a hard-driving youth football coach or a middle-school girlfriend or a rude drunk at a bar, carping and doubting forever, calling forth the silly/serious righteousness that readies someone to try to run through someone else. All those weird, dim motivational lodestars may look petty to those of us with aspirations too minor to warrant disparagement or doubt, but they presumably serve a purpose for their owners. There’s a reason why most of us don’t walk around our offices letting out crazy-eyed whoops and slamming work down on managers’ desks while yelling ALL DAY BABY or CAN’T STOP IT or something, but also most of our jobs don’t require living in denial at the unpleasantness of inflicting serious physical pain on ourselves and others.

But that pain does take its toll, and as the NFL season works towards its end amid Percocet prescriptions refilled by team doctors and grievous injuries denied beyond reason and the gnawing sense on all sides that this game inflicts more pain than any game should, things are going to get meaner. The notional haters firing up the NFL’s players will grow in size alongside the effort it takes those players to get out of bed in the morning. The New England Patriots, still the NFL’s masters at leveraging individual vanities and inferiority complexes into one massive, mechanized monstrosity of grievance, are ascendant again and look like a good bet to be the heroes of the coming mean season.

But what a sour, seething bunch of heroes, in New England and elsewhere — great and small at once, they give those of us looking for transcendence in the joy of athletic performance a glimpse of the real and rageful madness required for them to entertain us in such in a painful, wearing way. At this point in the season — the weather is cold, time is short, the light is lowering and everything hurts, all the time — the love is all on the living room side of things. That prideful fury reigns in the locker rooms and on the field is something of a bummer for those looking to the game for something finer, and it curdles and problematizes our watching, but it’s what the attrition of this harshest of games leaves behind after these months of their punishment and our pleasure. If the creeping, creepy realization of that doesn’t feel good on our side of the television, it almost certainly feels incalculably worse in that other, unimaginable universe projected on the screen. 14 weeks is a long time.

So yeah, let’s have some fun with some football picks? Only one of this week’s games pits two teams with winning records against each other — that would be the warm-and-fuzzy Pats and the Bears, who are probably just as insane but do not play in my time zone. They still have Neal Anderson, right? He’s pretty good.

Week 13 (and overall): David Roth: 7–8 (96–90–9); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 5–10 (93–92–9)

Sunday, December 12
• Cleveland at Buffalo (-1), 1:00 pm — DR: Cleveland; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Green Bay (-7) at Detroit, 1:00 pm — DR: Green Bay; ATTLCTDC: Detroit
• Tampa Bay (-2) at Washington, 1:00 pm — DR: Tampa Bay; ATTLCTDC: Washington
• Oakland at Jacksonville (-4), 1:00 pm — DR: Oakland; ATTLCTDC: Jacksonville
• Atlanta (-7.5) at Carolina, 1:00 pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Atlanta
• New York Giants (-2.5) at Minnesota, 1:00 pm — DR: New Jerey G; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G
• Cincinnati at Pittsburgh (-8.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Cincinnati; ATTLCTDC: Pittsburgh
• St. Louis at New Orleans (-9.5), 4:05 pm — DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Seattle at San Francisco (-5.5), 4:05 pm — DR: Seattle; ATTLCTDC: San Francisco
• Kansas City at San Diego (NO LINE), 4:15 pm — DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: Kansas City
• New England (-3) at Chicago, 4:15 pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: New England
• Miami at New York Jets (-5.5), 4:15 pm — DR: New Jersey J; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey J
• Denver (-5.5) at Arizona, 4:15 pm — DR: Denver; ATTLCTDC: Arizona
Philadelphia (-3.5) at Dallas, 8:20 pm — DR: Philadelphia; ATTLCTDC: Dallas

Monday, Dec. 13
• Baltimore (-3) at Houston, 8:30 pm — DR: Baltimore; ATTLCTDC: Baltimore

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Photo by ctoverdrive, from Flickr.

Solely in the interests of keeping up with a running local “story,” such as it is, I suppose it must be pointed out that the last full-time editorial gay male staffer gave notice at the New York Observer this morning, making for a solid 10 out of 10 (oh wait) 10 out of 11 departures in the last four or so months alone all being women and gay men (as far as we can tell from outside (previously we forgot Leon Neyfakh’s departure to the Boston Globe!)). Honestly, the Observer masthead is rendered obsolete frequently — as of now, there are zero women staff writers on the masthead, but neither the masthead nor we are up on any new hires, some of whom are surely women. Last we heard, they even had a woman editor come in for a job interview! God bless. Love you, newspaper! So in any event, Zeke Turner, who moved from media to real estate at the paper, is now bound for WWD, joining former Observer people Peter Kaplan and John Koblin.

A couple of weeks ago, for some reason, I was trying to put together a list of American writers from whom I have been awaiting new novels for at least five years or more. I only got as far as three names (Kirsten Bakis, Bob Shacochis and Harry Crews, if you’re scoring at home) but had I actually followed through the author at the top of the list would, of course, be Charles Portis. Every one of his books has been a joy, and the fact that there have only been five of them seems like we’re being cheated or denied somehow. This week’s Times Magazine has an all too brief piece about him, but it is absolutely correct when it notes that he is the “possessor of an original American literary voice comparable to Mark Twain’s.” If you’ve never read him, True Grit or Dog of the South are the best places to start, but be warned, you will wind up reading everything.

In Indiana, there is growing controversy over a store selling racist soaps with brand names like “Kolored Kids” and “Darkie.” (See the initial report here.) This seems important to point out, since it’s not in the segment above: “Fox59 spoke to two national experts Thursday on Black Americana and both tell me these kinds of soaps with these labels NEVER ever existed in our history. These aren’t reproductions but what are called ‘fantasy items’ printed purely for profit.”

Related: Hip Hop “Blackface” Cupcake Controversy