Pretentious luxury on the cheap at the Drake

What gives with these fancy hotels? [Warning: Rant thinly disguised as objective information] My wife and I live in St. Louis Missouri. Yesterday, we decided that I should take my two daughters to Chicago in early August, so today I made some arrangements. Now time is money--I don't want to be driving into downtown Chicago from a cheaper suburban hotel every day, wasting time sitting in traffic, when we should be spending every waking moment at Chicago's world-class museums and aquarium. Therefore, I set out to get accommodations right in the heart of Chicago. Knowing that this could be quite expensive, however, I did a bit of shopping through some frugal travel websites. I ended up at Priceline.com, the site where William Shatner's puffy image beckons me to come on in and save money (here I am being judgmental because Captain Kirk let himself go to pot). At Priceline, I saw that one could pick a hotel in downtown Chicago and pay anywhere from $150 to $500 per night. None of that for me! I decided to bid on a hotel room. For those of you who have never bid on a hotel room, the Priceline system offers substantial savings to you if you're willing to bid on a hotel room in a specific region of a city without knowing the name of the hotel that you will be assigned (assuming that your bid is high enough to purchase any hotel room at all). I indicated that I was willing to pay $100 per night for a 3 1/2 star hotel room in "zone five" of downtown Chicago. I figured that my modest bid would probably be rejected, but I was wrong. I had successfully purchased several nights at the Drake Hotel, which is just north of the Water Tower on The Magnificent Mile. Before placing the winning bid, I didn't know anything at all about the Drake Hotel, so I visited the Drake's site. You'll see lots of images of the kinds of carefree and well-to-do people who burn their money at the Drake. Many of the pictures at Drake website made me think of politicians hanging around with their mistresses. I saw that rooms typically range in price from $250-$350 per night. Sounds like I got quite a deal, right? Actually, the Drake is doing us all a service by charging a such outrageous prices (well, charging every body else such outrageous prices). They are making sure that when we stay there, that we are safely secluded from the riffraff, because the riffraff cannot afford to stay there. Extremely clever.

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China works to save its adolescents from Internet addiction

What do you do with a teenager that spends 10 hours a day playing online games. What if a teenager is unable to pull herself away from her Facebook account? The Chinese government is taking this ramped up usage of the Internet seriously, according to an article in the June 26, 2009 edition of Science (available online only to subscribers). The Science article focuses on treatment efforts by the General Hospital of Beijing's Addiction Medicine Center (AMC). The article quotes Tao Ran, a Chinese psychiatrist, who estimates that 5 million of the country's 300 million Internet users are "Internet addicts," and that adolescents are especially vulnerable. The concern is that excessive use of the Internet deprives people of valuable real life social interactions. Of the more than 3,000 cases documented by AMC, the patients were spending an average of nine hours per day using the Internet. The issue of "Internet addiction" is also being considered by American psychiatrists. The article notes a lively ongoing discussion as to whether "Internet addiction" should be included as a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) planned for release in 2012. Tao indicates that female patients are most often hooked on chat rooms, while male patients are addicted to online games. He notes that when the patients are involuntarily admitted for treatment, almost all of them suffer serious withdrawal symptoms, including anger, irritation and restlessness. AMC considers family therapy to be a central part of the treatment, although other treatments include "behavioral training, drug therapy for patients with mental symptoms, dancing and sports, reading, karaoke and elements of the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous." AMC is also suggesting a cause for Internet addiction:

Patients tend to have parents who are strict authoritarians or demand perfection, or come from single-parent households or homes in which the parents are frequently fighting.

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This much I know: AC Grayling

Today I share a few pearls from philosopher AC Grayling, writing for The Guardian. A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it. The democracy of blogging and tweeting is absolutely terrific in one way. It is also the most effective producer of rubbish and insult and falsehood we have yet invented. When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff? Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists. Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends. I'm not sure it is possible to think too much. You don't refresh your mind by partying in Ibiza. That single sentence: "science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty..." says more about my own views than an entire caffeine-fueled screed ever could. It's said that brevity is the soul of wit; those nine words illustrate that it can also be the soul of wisdom. Certainty seems to be the single most important thing that separates the devout believer from the atheist, the agnostic, the deist & the doubter. It's fine to say "my god, and my way of worshipping my god, will see me rewarded in the afterlife." I have no issue with that claim on the surface. But you can't be certain of it - certainly not certain enough to damn or pity people who disagree with you or dare to shine lights on the holes in your story. I can't be certain my direct ancestors had opposable big toes and could manufacture their own vitamin C or that our universe is thirteen billion years old, but that's the direction in which the evidence points - convincingly, with a giant pointy finger. No, I'm not certain at all, but that's where I'm putting my money. The holes in those converging storylines are not nearly as glaring as those present in the many, certain alternatives - and they're getting smaller all the time. All those from the "certainist" camp can do is rationalise (ironically enough) the size, shape and positioning of their holes - or look at their stories from such an angle that the holes aren't visible. Well, I prefer a story that makes sense no matter how you look at it.

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Round Midnight with Wes Montgomery

Have you ever heard music that you not only fully engages you at the moment, but which you carry with you wherever you go, even years later? Music that seeps into your bones and shapes who you become? Now that's quite an endorsement, right. I've already written about a couple musicians I greatly admired, including Oscar Peterson and Pat Metheny. Another one of my musical heroes was Wes Montgomery. He died an untimely death as a result of a heart attack in 1968, several years before I began to study jazz guitar. But I played his albums until I wore out the grooves (yes, I'm that old), especially Smokin' at the Half Note. I worked ever so hard to do what Montgomery did, but he made it look far too easy. This is especially amazing for a guy who didn't learn to play the guitar until he was 19, and who was self-taught at that. You can't possibly appreciate how difficult it is to be that melodic unless you try to do it yourself, for years. You can't understand the magic of his chordal technique and his octave solos unless you spend long hours urging your own fingers to try to emulate Wes Montgomery. There's a lot more too. Because I worked hard at it, I learned that you can get a beautiful tone out of an electric guitar if you give up the pick and use your thumb, but I still can't understand how he could rip off some of those quick riffs with his thumb. For decades, I've listened to Wes Montgomery's music, but I had never actually seen a video of him playing until tonight. I caught several youtubes, but most of them involved Montgomery later in his career, surrounded by (and suffocated by) too many other musicians, notably brass and string sections producers used to turn Montgomery's jazz into pop music that the masses would better appreciate. But this video is classic Wes Montgomery playing as part of a quartet. If you've never before known about Wes Montgomery, watch (but mostly listen) this video of "Round Midnight" and see whether Montgomery's music permeates all the way down into your bones too. Ask yourself whether music can be made more compellingly than this.

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