The Ear Inn

We met family friends for dinner last night at a historic dive in SoHo called The Ear Inn (pictured above¹). Last week, I had seen a Guardian article on the "50 best things to eat in the world"; number three on that list was the burger at a New York City restaurant called Little Owl. George, an old friend of my parents, enjoys a good burger, so I invited him to join us. It turned out that Little Owl doesn't offer burgers for dinner, so George suggested the Ear Inn. An old man, he enjoys visiting old places. His son Jimmy joined us.

The family loves meat: Jimmy mentioned he was taking a charcuterie class at the French Culinary Institute in town. He wants to learn how to age his own steaks. He made an interesting point about burgers -- an obvious one, in hindsight, but an interesting one nonetheless: places that cook all their burgers well done (e.g., Five Guys, In-and-Out Burger, etc.) ought to be considered in a separate category from restaurants where you can get burgers cooked to order. That's a distinction Matt and I didn't make when we listed our top five burger places². Jimmy also noted how difficult it is for restaurants to do something seemingly so simple: consistently cook a burger to order. I mentioned that celebrity chef Bobby Flay's Burger Palace doesn't seem to be able to do this. His stated M.O. is to cook the burgers medium but you have good odds of getting your burger bloody or overcooked instead. The Ear Inn cooked our medium burgers the way we ordered them. Good burger, but no fries: there's no fryer in the cramped kitchen.

¹The writing on the wall in the photo, next to the arrow, says that the blue line represents the water's edge of the island as it was in 1766.

²Matt's been too busy to post regularly on his eating blog, thanks in part to Launching Innovation, but if he reads this post, he'll have another two burger places to check out when the dust settles.

Preoccupied with 1985

One of the endlessly entertaining aspects of the Internet is that, no matter how obscure your interests, someone else probably shares them. For some reason, I found myself thinking of a short-lived sci-fi TV show a few days ago, called Otherworld. In the show, pitched as a "Lost in Space" on earth, the Sterling family (pictured above) accidentally passes through a portal in the Great Pyramid of Giza into an alternate dimension version of earth. Although the show only ran for 8 episodes in 1985, it turns out there's a fan site, OtherWorldonline.org, where you can watch all eight episodes online. I've been re-watching them this week. A couple of cultural/historical notes about the show:

- The actor who played the Sterling's teenage son, Tony O’Dell, was born Anthony Dell'Aquila. Interesting that he'd change his name to an Irish one, rather than something more generic (why not just "Dell"?).

- The show's second episode, "The Zone Troopers Build Men", reminded me of John Kerry's faux pas about how if you don't do well in school, "you end up in Iraq". In this episode, the character played by Tony O'Dell, Trace Sterling, gets automatically drafted into the Zone Troopers, the alternate dimension's state trooper-like paramilitary organization, when he slacks off in high school and his grades start dropping. Perhaps this episode's writers shared Kerry's attitude toward the military. There were a couple more interesting footnotes about this episode.

- The second episode guest starred the late Mark Lenard, the actor perhaps best known for portraying Spock's father Sarek in various Star Trek episodes and movies.

- Even though a rudimentary idea of Internet hacking was introduced into pop culture by the early 1980s in movies such as Tron (1982) and War Games (1983) (although the term "Internet" wasn't), the second episode of Otherworld takes a more primitive approach. When Trace Sterling's parents want to find out the terms of his enlistment in the Zone Troopers, rather than hacking into the Zone Troopers' computer system remotely, they break in and steal the Zone Troopers' computer.

Below is the title/credit sequence for the show, which summarizes its premise.

"Foundations of Crisis"

John Mauldin's website features an essay his friend Doug Casey originally wrote in 1997, "Foundations of Crisis", updated with some current parenthetical commentary by Casey. Those who are open to the possibility that there may be recurring patterns in history may find this an interesting read. Below are a few excerpts.

Casey writes that generations cycle through four archetypes, "Hero", "Artist", "Prophet", and "Nomad". The two excerpts below relate to the "Hero" archetype.

Hero Archetype

The "GI" generation, born between 1901 and 1924, includes basically all living people in their mid-70s and older. They grew up and came of age in the midst of the most traumatic years in human history: the 1930s and '40s. This was a time of catastrophic financial and economic collapse, world war, political dictatorship, genocide, and virulent ideology, among other unpleasant things; a period of intense turmoil. The times required them to be civic minded, optimistic, regular guys who could be counted on to do the right thing, fit in, and see that everybody got a square deal. As a consequence of what they've been through, they tend to be indulgent parents. As kids they're "good"; as adults they're selfless, constructive, and communitarian. Hero archetypes encounter a Crisis environment in Young Adulthood; assuming they survive it, the odds are the rest of their lives will be lived in growing economic prosperity, leading to a leisurely retirement.

[...]

The kids born between 1982 and perhaps 2002 should be another Hero archetype. My own experience with them is that they're shaping up that way. Represented by clean-cut, straight-arrow Power Rangers. Quite a reaction to the sewer-dwelling Mutant Ninja Turtles that were analogs for the previous generation. They're "'can do" kids, programmed to do the right thing in a smoke-free, drug-free, eco-sensitive, politically correct world. Like all Hero types, they respect their elders, do what they're told without much questioning authority. That's just the type of person you want to have fighting a war for you, and that's probably just what they'll wind up doing. Just like the last Hero types, the GIs.

Casey on the Boomers, who he characterizes as part of the "Prophet" archetype:

They came of age during a period that might be called an Awakening, and it's recurred on schedule five times so far in American history. Awakenings are times of religious and moral ferment, when the youth tend to challenge prevailing cultural values pretty much across the board. Young adults were into New Age things this time around, in the 1960s and '70s. At the time it seemed utterly shocking and completely new, but that was only because nobody then alive had seen the previous Utopian Awakening in the 1830s and '40s, the Pietist Awakening of the 1740s and '50s, the Puritan Awakening of the 1630s and '40s, or the Protestant Reformation of the 1530s and '40s.

[...]

The Boomers are an archetypal Prophet generation, a type born after a secular crisis, just in time to create another one. Get the image of a grim elder, with a well-defined vision of what's right and wrong, calling down wrath, and laying down the law for a troubled nation in chaotic times. That's the type of person who tends to lead countries into wars, as well as through them. Interestingly, the Boomers in America have their counterparts abroad today, especially in China, where they grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Two ideologically driven, righteous groups running two such powerful and alien cultures is almost a guaranteed formula for a millennial-sized crisis. Which should appear, coincidentally, sometime shortly after the millennium.

Casey anticipating a secular crisis:

[T]he way the current generations line up relative to historical analogs, an excellent case can be made the U.S. is approaching another time of secular crisis, a Fourth Turning, with an expected due date of 2005 -- seven years from now -- plus or minus a few years in either direction. The Stamp Acts catalyzed the American Revolution, the election of Lincoln catalyzed the Civil War, the Crash of '29 catalyzed the Depression/WW II era. What might precipitate the elements now floating in solution? The answer is, practically any random event that's sufficiently traumatic. Any of the theses of current disaster/action novels and movies will do nicely. Perhaps the accidental or intentional release of a super plague vector. The crashing of an airliner into the Capitol during a joint session. (Close, but not quite.) An all-out assault on the IRS computers by an armed group -- or perhaps the computers just melting down due to the Year 2000 Problem. Perhaps a financial disaster that cascades into the Greater Depression. In any of these, or a hundred other scenarios, the federal government would almost certainly act precipitously and with a heavy hand, which would bring on a whole other set of consequences.

[...]

There's no way of telling where the Crisis will lead, or how it will end. That's going to depend not only on exactly who's in control, but what they do, whom they're up against, and a hundred other variables we can't even anticipate. One thing that seems certain is that real crisis brings out strong (although not necessarily wise) leadership. Because of its age and size, it will come from the Boomer generation, and it will be in the mold of Roosevelt or Lincoln -- both very dangerous precedents. The Boomers in Elderhood will be dogmatic, harsh, puritanical, and quite willing to burn down the barn in order to destroy whatever rats they see. Admix that attitude to a time resembling the Revolution, the Civil War, or WW II, overlain with today's ethnic strife, urbanization, financial overextension, and powerful, compact new weaponry in the hands of foreign fanatics out to teach the Great Satan a lesson, and it's a real witch's brew.

Contingency and Causation

On his Atlantic blog yesterday, Ross Douthat posted an excerpt from an article by Princeton professor Larry Bartels in The Wilson Quarterly ("The Irrational Electorate"). In his article, Bartels argues that sea changes in politics are often driven not by changes in ideology or political philosophy but instead are contingent on other factors, e.g., economic conditions. Surveying the political realignments of the Depression era, Bartels writes,

Considering America's Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to "throwing the bums out" than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply--and simple-mindedly--rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.