Tag: Frameworks

Rugby 7s: Two Halves, No Whole

JulianLeave a comment

To win, attract fans. To attract fans, form a cohesive game. 

Rugby 7s needs to choose a side.

After three days at the HSBC SVNS World Championship in Bordeaux (and 8 years following the sport as a casual fan), I think it’s standing at a crossroads. It can lean into being the 14-minute party it already is, or it can grow into a full, standalone sport. Right now it’s trying to be both, and that’s untenable. 

(For anyone who’s never watched: sevens is rugby boiled down to 7 players a side and two 7-minute halves. A full day runs more than a dozen games, back to back. It’s the tasting flight of athletic events.)

I argued last week that a sport’s heir wins by cutting the boring parts. Sevens already did the cutting (15 players down to 7, 80 minutes down to 14). It just never decided what it was cutting toward. 

If You Lean Into the Shortness

The short version is already good. It just wastes its own format. Two fixes:

1. Use the downtime. The games are too short for fans to bond with the teams, so spend the breaks building investment. Share stats on the players. Run through how important this game is. Each team is only on the field for under 20 minutes. That tightness is good. Use this time to reinvigorate the fans about the metagame. 

2. Vary the downtime. How many times can a crowd sing “Sweet Caroline” and watch the “sleepy cam” (the one that finds someone napping in the stands)? Once a day, the organizers seem to believe. These approaches are repetitive. Put a team on interstitial fun: t-shirt cannons, quick water-balloon fights, fan footraces for prizes, a costume contest for cash. You already have a fanbase that turns up in costume. Lean in.

If You Make It A Full-Length Sport

A 14-minute sport is not full-length. The organizers pack three days of tournaments together because each game is only 14 minutes long. What if they made it 2 hours instead? The ledger: 

What it has going for it

  • Fast play. Almost no setup or positioning. All action.
  • It’s a highlight reel. Lots of intensity, no dull moments, and a huge amount of drama. Most of basketball happens in the last 2 minutes. Rugby 7s has a new exciting event happening at least every minute. 

What it’s up against

  1. No obvious fanbase. Rugby fans already have two codes to follow: union (15 a side) and league (13 a side). Sevens is a third, and a stripped-down union at that. Why would a rugby fan adopt a third version? And a newcomer has no particular reason to start with the niche one. (Except that sevens is the Olympic version. And that’s a big leg up.) 
  2. Injuries. In 3 days I watched 9+ players get carried or helped off, 2 of them on stretchers. The playing base is growing fast (it looks like a blast to play, if you’re not attached to your future cognition). For a sport chasing families and casual fans, that body count is a bad look on camera. 
  3. A touring format that fights fandom. There’s no home-and-away. A small set of core teams (8 this season) tours a circuit (Dubai, Cape Town, Singapore, Perth, Vancouver, LA), then 12 teams contest a 3-city World Championship (Hong Kong, Valladolid, Bordeaux). That’s a time-trial structure (Formula 1, tennis, the surfing tour), not a league. Great for a traveling roadshow, lousy for “my team versus your team”. 
  4. Yearly churn. Each season the bottom of the top tier is relegated (down to “SVNS 2”) and new teams come up. So the division’s membership changes every year. Just as a new market learns its team, the team can drop out of the top flight. Hard to grow roots that way.

Changes I’d make

Regardless of which path Rugby 7s takes, these are improvements to the game: 

  1. A score shouldn’t end the game. Right now, if you’re up by two scores when the clock hits zero, you’ve effectively won but everyone keeps playing until one of a number of game events happens (the ball goes out of bounds, e.g.). It’s an anticlimax. Either call it the moment it’s decided, or flip it and give the trailing team a lifeline: they keep playing as long as they keep scoring. 
  2. Let the halves run longer. Fast doesn’t have to mean 7-minute halves. Hockey is just as fast and handles the gas-tank problem with constant substitutions. Roll players on and off and you can stretch the game without melting the athletes. (Note: You can’t just make it longer. They tried. World Rugby cut their finals from two ten-minute halves down to two seven-minute halves in 2017 precisely to avoid injuries. You have to add fresh legs and deepen the bench.) 
  3. Host it in party cities. Amsterdam, Budapest, Las Vegas. The core audience wants to drink for 3 days straight in costume while watching sport. Put the event where that’s already the local economy. (Bordeaux, in fairness, understood the brief.) 
  4. Make the drop goal matter. The scoring: a try (similar to a touchdown in American football) is 5, a conversion (like the kick after a touchdown) is 2 (so a converted try is 7); a penalty or drop goal (similar to a field goal that’s not after a touchdown) is 3. Which means a team down by two unconverted tries can claw back exactly to a tie (7 + 3) but cannot win it. Bump the drop goal to 4, maybe even 5. The drop goal turns from a museum piece into a live weapon, and “up by 10” stops feeling safe. 
  5. Publish the draws earlier. Tell fans when their team actually plays. As it stands, you find out the morning of the first match, which doesn’t help fans. Currently, a bunch of fans missed the first half of the first day. If your team is playing in the morning, would you make it to the first game (early) and then have a nap? Definite possibility.  
  6. Stop the clock during dead time. The clock keeps running during penalty kick-outs, after a score but before the restart, and between a scrum call and the scrum itself (a scrum is like a hockey face-off where three teammates are tied together). That warps the game and rewards stalling. It bites hardest on a yellow card, when a team who’s playing 6 players against 7 for 2 minutes can just bleed the clock. Stop the clock and the gamesmanship dies.
  7. Trim the pool stage. You play 3 pool games to cut 12 teams to 8, and then the real tournament is also 3 games. Half the days are positioning, and the pools barely change anything. That’s too much foreplay for the payoff.
  8. Make the final feel like a final. Today the final is the same length as every other game. Give it longer halves, or make it a best-of-3 with the 3rd/4th-place match slotted in between for the breather (if you’re concerned about injuries). 
  9. Fix the scrum. Over the last 3 days, I cannot recall a time when the team rolling the ball lost possession. That makes scrums in rugby 7s basically just a restart with extra steps. This one needs a revamp, because as-is it’s just wasting time. 

If rugby 7s keeps sprinting the direction it is, it’s going to get tackled. Time to keep tinkering and pick a side. 

Today’s Games Played

The cheese standoff. A vendor slices me 200g of emmental and quotes 3 euros 50. I say card. She says 5-euro minimum on card. I say card is all I’ve got. She says no deal. I walk to the monger two stalls down who sells me 200g of emmental for 5 euros 40. Partner points out how, in the US, the vendor grumbles but eventually takes my money. I’m reminded of the time $20 was as good as 20€. 

The bottle-cap. A French security officer asks if I have bottles. He squeezes the bag. It crunches. He says, “Bottles.” He tells me to take off the cap and bin it. I take off the cap, walk towards the bin, pocket the cap, and walk past him into the stadium with the bottle. (Once inside, I reapply the bottle cap: this wasn’t mere sport, I wanted to use that bottle cap!) French security continues its purposelessness. 

Why I love the kick-and-chase (and you should do)

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To win the rugby match, score the most points. To score points, move the ball forward. 

Rugby 7s is my favorite spectator sport. My favorite move: the kick-and-chase. The move is what it sounds like: kick the ball into the space behind the defense, then run it down before they can. (Context for the unfamiliar: rugby is a sport similar to American football. In rugby, you cannot throw the ball forward.) 

Here’s why it works.

1. Speed wins the chase. Some teams and players have wheels (the Kenyan men, Japan’s number 3, Mariana Talatoka for Fiji’s women). When you’re that fast, the kick is more a pass to yourself (it’s harder to run with the ball than after it), and you win the foot race more often than not.

2. Nobody’s home in the back. With only 7 per side, teams can’t afford a defensive sweeper. Drop one player from the line and you’re defending six across, and 6-on-7 gives a free space to the offense out wide. 

3. The defense is facing the wrong way. The instant the ball leaves your foot, you’re already sprinting. They have to stop, turn, and go. How many of them will make it there faster than your teammates? 

4. Even a miss pays off. Lose possession and you’ve still gained sizable yardage — and their ball-recoverer will need support to mount a reasonable offense. No second man means no ruck (pass through the legs, during which only your team can grab the ball) and no ruck means they hand the ball right back. The kick-and-chase-to-tackle-and-recover pipeline is a strong one. 

5. My favorite: the bluff. Just having a kick-and-chase in your bag forces the defense to pick a poison. Guard you tight and your kick gains more value. Sit back to cover it and the holes open up for your runs. The threat alone bends the whole defense. If a team restructured their strategy around it (instead of simply playing rugby 7s like it’s a faster rugby 15s), the metagame could easily undergo a paradigm shift. 

So if anyone’s ever complimented your speed (e.g. if Partner referred to you as “having wheels” and I made oinking noises in reference to you being a greased pig), develop your kick. Then go chase it.

— HSBC Sevens World Finals Day 1, Bordeaux, France

Murphy’s Law

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When you set up the pieces properly, you’re okay when they fall. 

Murphy’s law says that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Murphy doesn’t know how robust my systems are.

I woke up at 4:30am to catch the 5:01 train to Paris for my 6:45am operation[1]. If I’d missed it? I had another train half an hour later that would get me in 7 minutes after my desired check-in time. Robust enough and didn’t need it.

They were to constrict my pupil, wiggle my embedded lens, and release the edge of my iris that was caught under the lip of the plastic. The nurse gave me dilation drops instead of constriction. Clearly their system was not robust enough. Fortunately, medicine is, and my surgeon just flooded my eye with constricting agent. The constrictor won.

Next, immediately back to Étampes to do a 10am walkthrough with the French leasing agent. I needed to be out the door 10 minutes after my surgery to make the train to be 7 minutes late for meeting the agent. It took me 15. I was 2 minutes late for the train, but the train was 3 minutes late. Insufficiently robust? An uber would have backstopped the train. And if all else failed, Partner was at the apartment and capable of doing the walkthrough.

Then back to Paris for a follow-up appointment at 2. We missed the train by 5 minutes. It didn’t matter, we could have missed three more trains and been fine. The next train was late. Still fine.

At the appointment, the doctor explained the suture he has placed in my eye. “When does it need to come out?” “At some point.” “What do you mean ‘at some point’? Two weeks? Two months? Two years?” “Not before two months, and two years is probably fine.” Surprisingly robust.

I set up today so nothing could fail. I selected this surgery because it’s hard to go terribly wrong. 

Capping your downside is a good strategy. But the safe choices aren’t always the ones that everyone would think they are. E.g.: 

  • Surgery in a foreign country where you speak the language at a foreign-language-college-student level 
  • Scalpeling your eye 
  • Inserting plastic into the eye 
  • Suturing that same eye
  • Pursuing follow-up corrective surgery for a minor adjustment on the same day as you’re moving out of your apartment and leaving the city for good. 

We packed an umbrella today. We left it in the storage locker at the train station. It rained. We enjoyed watching the rain fall in sheets while under the plentiful overhang of the train station. Twice.

I generally sleep 8 hours per day so I have the strength to power through days like today. 

Julian: 1

Murphy: 0

[1] All times are approximate.

French Security: Worse Than Nothing

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Whatever they’re trying to do, they’re failing.

French security sucks. It’s worse than nothing. At least nothing wouldn’t delay tourists.

I approach the metal detector. I hand the officer my backpack. I walk through the detector. He hands me my backpack. Sounds like a normal security process. Except he never looked inside my bag.

Same thing yesterday at the Paris catacombs: at the end, a man seated at a desk with a sign saying open your bags so we can ensure you’re not stealing bones. But he doesn’t open your bags. He doesn’t even wave you on. He just plays on his phone.

Three months ago at a Parisian rugby match: the security officers pat down every entrant. Partner stayed in my line. The officer gestured her to a line with a female agent. Partner walked past him. He let her go.

At Orly Airport, you must navigate through all of the stanchions in sequence, even if the line is 0 people. An extra 60 meters of walking per person. One white-haired woman ducked under the rope. The officers yelled at her. She said, “I’m old, it’s hard to walk!” They demanded she go back.

The Louvre was heisted last October. Has nothing changed? Do none of the workers know the point of their jobs? Do none of them believe in their work? Are they too snoozy from the fondue lunch? (Author’s note: fondue is Swiss. But it does make me snoozy.)

What game is this?

The goal of the game is to win. I say that a lot. Sometimes too much. The goal of the game is to win; you win by doing X. But it’s pretty fundamental: if you’re not trying to win, what are you doing?

Sometimes the goal is different. Sometimes it’s to not-lose. Sometimes it’s to survive. Sometimes it’s to tie. But this security bullshit? Whatever it is, it’s not achieving it.

Even some contrived goal, like “create a specific form of job stability for a certain number of people in France without disrupting the general French living and working systems”, couldn’t you do that better? And that’s already super contrived.

The best rebuttal: fake security still deters. Which is fair. True. Like the faux eyes on the wings of a moth, the mere existence of security may prevent me from attempting to sneak a gun into the [insert grand French monument].

But fake security works when it appears real. If the moth has a sign saying “These are just mock eyes; I’m actually a helpless moth, teehee”, that bug is getting nommed. And today, at the Palais de Justice, a guard waves visitors through a body scanner. The alarm went off on the visitor behind me. The guard ignored it, clicked “Ok,” and waved the woman through. You can’t advertise the fakeness! Bluffing is one thing! This is bluffing while turning your cards face up!

Even I get it!

I don’t like security. I’m fully anti-TSA. Considering the rate of deaths by terrorist attack vs the rate of deaths by automobile crashes, I’m even pro-shrug-it-off re 9/11.

But even I understand the point of security. I get why we have it. I just think it’s dumb.

This version of security is the worst version! Not only does it have no impact; it also wastes people’s time! What the hell are you doing, France?!

Do you want to get invaded by the Germans for the fourth time in 160 years? Because you’re sure acting like it!

The Walk Becomes a Sprint

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To inherit a game, serve the crowd its keepers forgot. To serve the crowd, cut the boring parts.

Four times, strangers have asked whether my hat is a Savannah Bananas reference. It isn’t. Now that I know what they are, I wish it were.

A month ago, Partner told me I’d like the Savannah Bananas. The recommendation sat on my to-do list (read: “email inbox”) until this morning, when I finally read up. I am hooked. At least on the concept. 

Two decades ago, my father told me he didn’t get the appeal of e-sports. I asked whether he got the appeal of regular sports. He did. So I asked: when you watch football on TV, how do you know those are real people? If they swapped every player for a digital avatar, how would you know? 

Professional sports is entertainment. The money comes from the people watching, not the people playing. Say that out loud, and a lot of baseball starts to look indefensible. (Partner thinks I should henceforth refer to old baseball as “indefensi-ball”. I like the joke, but fear readers would find it intolera-ball.) 

The Savannah Bananas play Banana Ball, which is baseball, except someone took the rulebook and asked, of every slow part, Who is this for? A walk is the most boring thing in the sport: four boring balls, a slow and boring trot to first, a predictable outcome, nothing to see. So Banana Ball has no walks. Ball four starts a sprint, where the batter runs as far around the bases as he can while every fielder but the pitcher handles the ball in turn. The dullest outcome in baseball became a footrace.

The rest rhymes. No mound visits. No stepping out of the box. A 2-hour clock, so the game can’t sprawl. Catch a foul ball in the stands and the batter is out, which turns the crowd into a tenth defender. One guy plays on stilts (Dakota Albritton). Another bats in a cape (Reese Alexiades). I’m surprised the players still go by their own names. 

The cape doesn’t help him play baseball better. It does help him play banana ball better.

Scoring changed too. Win an inning (i.e. score the most runs in it), and you get a point. One point per inning, like sets in tennis. My grandfather leaves every baseball game before the 9th “to beat the traffic.” He couldn’t pull that in banana ball, because in the final inning every run is its own point, leaving every banana ball game to a dramatic finish. He would stay.

One detail sold me. This scoring system means the home team has an obvious edge: batting last every inning, it only has to hit until its ahead by one run. (Baseball fans would notice this as a host of walk-off opportunities.) I noticed that and assumed it was a flaw. But they even invented a rule for it! It’s called the Equalizer Point. If the visiting team pulls off more trick plays than the home team by the 8th (a behind-the-back toss for an out, a backflip catch, popping the ball off your glove and into your bare hand for a catch), the visitors get a free point before the last inning. The home team’s structural advantage, paid back to the road team in degree of difficulty. Whoever built this spends their showers thinking about the same fairness questions a real league does. They just answer them in the currency of the show. Because this league is just as real as Major League Baseball. 

Even the charity is a pun: the team’s nonprofit, Bananas Foster, supports foster kids. It’s a real charity. And also a pun. It’s bits all the way down! 

You could file all of this under parody, and parody has a ceiling. It works only while you remember the original, so it can never outgrow the thing it mocks. But the Bananas aren’t mocking baseball. They kept the bones (a pitcher, a batter, a diamond, innings) and rebuilt the rest out of love. That is what an heir does.

Heirs don’t stay capped by the thing they came from. They inherit it. Rome spent the better part of 3 centuries feeding Christians to lions; then, in the year 380, the empire made Christianity its official religion, and the church went on to inherit Rome’s whole apparatus: its language, its hierarchy, its capital, even the old chief priest’s title, Pontifex Maximus, which the Pope still carries. The offshoot outlived the host.

Games run the same play on a faster clock. Cricket already did it. A Test match can last 5 days, and the purists love every hour, but a stripped-down, made-for-TV format called T20 showed up and became the sport’s commercial engine, the version with the crowds and the money. Later this week, I’m attending the Rugby 7s world championship. I’ve only been to one match of full rugby (15 per side) – never again! – but the 20-minute, seven-person format has made me a diehard fan. 

In 2023 Major League Baseball, the incumbent itself, gave itself a pitch clock. Games got 24 minutes shorter, attendance crossed 70 million for the first time since 2017, and ratings rose for the first time since 2012. Banana ball has had a game clock since 2020. (It started in 2018.) That is what the early innings of a succession look like.

The mechanism is always the same. A game gets, well, gamed to the point where it’s no fun anymore. It calcifies. It gets boring to watch, which is fatal, because the watching is what pays. Then someone arrives who treats fun as an engineering problem, and the crowd starts to drift his way, and the money follows the crowd. I’ve made this argument at the scale of a sandwich shop. The Bananas are making it at the scale of America’s Pastime.

You could call the Bananas a parasite. They feed on a host they need alive; half the jokes only work if you know the real game. (“What counts as a trick play?” requires a frame of reference.) Sure. But a parasite that devours its host and moves into the empty niche is just evolution running on schedule. We mammals also once lived in burrows, waiting out the dinosaurs. (As a PhD in biology, Partner does not support this analogy.) 

Give Banana Ball 30 years and it will have its own record book, its own purists, its own slow sacred stretches no one is allowed to touch, maybe even its own children’s rec and traveling teams, and some new weirdo will turn up to strip it for parts. Christianity inherited Rome, then spent centuries hardening into the thing Luther showed up to protest. Every heir becomes an incumbent. Every incumbent grows an heir.

None of this works unless there’s nothing sacred underneath, and there isn’t. No essence of baseball is being betrayed, because there is no essence of baseball, the same way (as I’ve argued before) there is no essence of golf. “Real baseball” is just the version that happened to harden before you were born. Strip it down, hand it back to the crowd, and the purists will call it desecration. It’s only the next version.

Catholics took 3 centuries to get from the lions to the leadership. Baseball is only up to the pitch clock. The new game is less competitive than the old one. It is also, at last, worth watching to the end. Even my grandfather would accept the traffic.

Will You Take Twenty Dollars?

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The goal of the game is to play. You play by paying the entrance fee. Everyone’s invited. 

Outside the original ruin bar in Budapest, the bouncer quoted me the price to skip the line: “Ten euros.” 

“Ten euros for two?” I offered. 

“Ten euros each,” he said. 

“Will you take twenty dollars for two?” 

“Of course,” he replied, in a voice so light and generous it could only belong to commerce. ($20 is about 15% less than 20€.)

He wasn’t being sloppy. He was filtering. Part of his job is revenue generation. The other part is selecting patrons who will spend more money inside. The 15% discount doesn’t matter; if we’re willing to play his game, he’s already won. 

My favorite cities have always been the commercial ones. Vegas when I was young, then recently New York and Amsterdam. They run on a meritocracy of cash, with a cosmopolitan, equalizing energy. Nobody cares who you are or where you came from: Your money is good here. 

Everyone in these cities is trying to screw you, at least a little, and often not subtly. New York: There’s a man in an official-looking vest selling tickets to the Staten Island Ferry, which is free. Vegas casinos install ugly carpets and no clocks so you keep your eyes on the slot machines and forget what time it is. The Dutch more or less invented economic colonialism. None of these are ethical, but there is a particular brand of honesty to them. There’s an honesty in a structure being explicitly hyper-optimized for a purpose. A traveler going to Las Vegas may affectionately refer to it as “Lost Wages”, and go anyway! 

Social games (status, position, politics) extract, too. They just don’t tell you the price. I’ll take the bouncer with a clear sense of haggle over a gatekeeper with an opaque shibboleth any day. He’s named his price. I haggled at it. He accepted. 

Commerce can be a brutal game. But it’s also fair, kind, and possible. I remember talking with a homeless New Yorker two blocks from Central Park in 2021. Israeli-born, formerly US military, he told me he loved homelessness in New York: the crowds, the parks, the safety, the free food everywhere. New York is a wonderful place to have nothing.  

So was Las Vegas: it was the first place I went when I moved into a van. You don’t need to gamble; you can people-watch, eat a meatball the size of your head for $10, or palm a $1 cocktail shrimp meant to lure you toward a table you’ll never sit at. Abundance runs downhill to those willing to travel for it. But you must be willing to travel. And you must accept that one day it will dry up. 

This new generation doesn’t gamble. Vegas, needing new revenue sources, raised its food prices. After my prior trip to Sin City disappointed, the last time I had the opportunity for a layover in Vegas, I went to Reno a day early instead. 

The bouncer’s “of course” was more than a discount. It felt like the loose money of my early twenties, the ZIRP years in the Bay Area, when a kid fresh out of college could get hired to write at $50 an hour because nobody was counting that closely yet. It felt like being let in.

Your money is good here. So is mine. The door is open if you’re willing to play.  

And perhaps the most beautiful part: Whenever some entity – a country or company or culture – makes rules excluding some people from playing, they’ll rapidly lose the commerce game that made them dominant in the first place. It’s self-correcting, a thing of beauty. 

Of course.

Cone-Eyes

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The goal of medicine should be optimal health. You can achieve optimal health through all sorts of pathways.

Tomorrow, they will slice into my eye (graphic representation). I’ve been eagerly awaiting this day for years.

Fifteen years ago, I learned I have keratoconus, a degenerative eye disease that prompted my sister to nickname me “cone-eyes.”

I first wore glasses at ~12, contacts at ~15. Hated both. The etiology is unclear: maybe the growth plates that jammed in my cheeks as a child; maybe eye-rubbing caused the mis-shape; maybe the mis-shape caused the eye-rubbing. By the end of one’s twenties, the cone generally stabilizes.

Most people avoid elective medical interventions. As my mother likes to say: “You only get one body.” That logic explains why most people stop at the first reasonable doctor, take the standard recommendation, and live with whatever they’ve been handed.

I know at least three ways to play this game better. You can hire the world’s best, every time (expensive, not always available). You can take what’s offered, set low expectations, and hope (cheap, sometimes works). Or you can attack the doctors until you find one who doesn’t buckle. 

I do the third.

For my eyes, one optometrist wanted me to harden my corneas. Standard of care. I declined for my case. Another doctor, in southwestern Spain, wanted to harden them and then install hard plastic lenses. Closer.

Now, in Paris, I’ve found the Center for Keratoconus and the Cornea. The practice literally says “keratoconus” in its name. This specific surgeon looks at eyes like mine all day, every day. 700 of these surgeries; 0 major complications. Of the ~2 million performed worldwide, the number who have gone blind doesn’t appear in the literature. I believe it’s either 0 or close to it.

The risks:

  • The lens rotates (a second procedure is then needed to re-seat it).
  • If my vision deteriorates, I will need to replace the lenses. (The lenses won’t cause this deterioration: it’s just a natural occurrence for some people as they age.) 
  • A punch to the eye becomes a much bigger problem.
  • Worse night vision.
  • Infection (very unlikely with proper care).

The benefits:

  • Perfect vision, no glasses.
  • Perfect peripheral vision. Today, to look at something off the edge of my vision, I turn my whole head. The edges of my glasses cap my field. After tomorrow, just my eyes move.
  • Better at sports.
  • A weirder benefit: I’m less anxious without glasses. Legally blind without them, but calmer. I don’t know why. After tomorrow, I won’t have to choose.

I already spend most of my life attempting not to be eye-gouged. After tomorrow, that preference intensifies. In exchange, the head-swivel stops.

Today, walking through the park, I removed my glasses and looked at them. Despite the humorous engraving on the side[1], I’ve never liked them. I hope tomorrow evening to jump up and down on them in glee.

I feel nervous. That’s why the surgeon gave me xanax. That, and he’ll be operating on my eyes while I’m still using them. 

Will it go well? We’ll see, I hope. 

[1] It reads “HURRR DURRR !!!”

Fishy Paprikash

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The dish is what the chef cooks. The meal is what the customer eats.

At 3pm this afternoon, I bit into a chicken paprikash. “This tastes fishy,” I said to Partner, and shifted to the other chicken thigh on the plate. 

Fifteen minutes later, Partner ate from the fishy thigh. “This tastes fishy,” she said. I agreed, and we continued on with our snack.

At the end of the meal, the waiter asked why we’d only eaten 2/3 of the portion. I said, “That piece tasted fishy.” 

The waiter took the plate back to the chef. Two minutes later, he returned. The chef had tasted the piece. The piece did not taste of fish. “The fish, you see, is kept in a sealed bag separate from the chicken.” 

Partner replied something like, “It tasted fishy to me.” I agreed. Partner clarified: we did not think it actually was fish, just that it tasted more like fish than chicken should. (I did not say anything. I thought it more helpful solution to let the guy spin his way to a result.)

The waiter left. He returned with a plate of pickled red onions. “We discovered what it is!” he said. “Three of us in the kitchen tasted and conferred. These may have been on it, so it might have tasted like fish.”

We tasted them. They tasted like pickled red onions. We said, “These taste like pickled red onions.” He insisted we smell them, then taste them. We smelled them, then tasted them. We said, “These taste like pickled red onions.” 

Neither of us had been terribly unhappy. One of the two chicken thighs tasted like fish. No biggie: there are plenty of chicken paprikash in the Budapest sea.

Later, as I reflect, I’m less irked by the fishy food than the denial. Whether or not the dish “contains” fish, our experience of it was fishy. Taste is an experience.

The waiter could have won. Studies show that dissatisfied customers whose experiences improve are actually happier than those who were never dissatisfied (the Service Recovery Paradox). How about honoring our experience? “I’m so sorry you experienced it as fishy. The chef tasted it and I tasted it and we couldn’t get to the bottom of it, but I hope you’ll give us another shot next time” beats denying the fishiness.

Throw in a free shot of palinka (super cheap Hungarian national alcohol that everybody’s grandfather makes), even better. Partner & I wouldn’t have drunk it (we’ve had enough palinka for three lifetimes), but that’s not the point.

We weren’t fishing for a discount or trying to catch some special treatment. But even if we are, he’s better off taking our bait. Floundering for an explanation only sinks the ship deeper. 

No amount of swimming upstream would change our reported experience, and a little humility would have been net-positive.

The chef tasted the food. We ate the meal.

St. Stephen’s Hand

JulianLeave a comment

When is a hand not a Hand? 

St. Stephen’s Hand is definitely St. Stephen’s Hand and is probably not St. Stephen’s hand. 

  • St. Stephen: 11th-century king of Hungary. Real guy. Had a right hand. 
  • St. Stephen’s Basilica: big church in Budapest. Contents include marble, gold, and a mummified right hand. 
  • St. Stephen’s hand: the actual historical hand of St. Stephen, dead 15 August 1038. 
  • St. Stephen’s Hand: mummified hand. Made the rounds: Croatia, Austria, now Budapest. Encased in an ornate golden box. 

The Catholic Church venerates this mummified hand as St. Stephen’s Hand. And thanks to fancy modern technology, we could test whether it’s also St. Stephen’s hand. 

But does it matter? 

Facts vs Hand-y Symbols

Carbon dating could tell us whether the hand comes from the right decade. 

DNA testing could tell us at least whether the hand is from a male and likely if the ancestry is a probable match (and not, say, an Egyptian mummy).

I don’t buy that it matters. 

The Hand of St. Stephen comes from the same organization that brought you The Body of Christ. To a Catholic, the eucharist is both the literal body of Christ, and Catholics who consume it are not cannibals. 

To a non-Catholic, those don’t jibe. 

Where laypeople see logical inconsistencies, Catholics have hyper-specific explanations fit for each circumstance. 

Idolatry is prohibited in Catholicism, thanks to the original constitution (the Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston). 

Yet, the entire basilica is organized around a mummified hand under glass, a money slot next to it, and candles you can light for €1.

Catholics say praying in front of The Hand is not idolatry. Most Protestants and nearly all Jews disagree. But Catholics have a particular distinction for this sort of behavior: 

  • “Veneration” is the appropriate honoring of a holy symbol that points the worshipper toward God. 
  • “Worship” is the inappropriate honoring of the symbol itself as God. 

In Catholic doctrine, categorically different. From the outside, indistinguishable. 

If I can’t externally verify whether you’re worshipping or venerating, is it idolatry? 

What is the sound of one St. Stephen’s Hand clapping? 

The Castle

In 1896 Hungary built a mock castle out of wood and cardboard for its millennium celebration: Vajdahunyad Castle.  

The castle proved so popular that, from 1902-1908, Hungary rebuilt Vajdahunyad Castle out of stone. This building blends Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements spanning ten centuries of Hungarian architecture. It now houses the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture. 

Partner asks: is it a real castle? 

Across the river and on top of the hill, the Buda Castle has been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times over the last 750 years. The most recent incarnation follows severe damage in WWII, so it is newer than Vajdahunyad Castle, and it is in a modernist style, so it looks less “castle-y” than the Vajdahunyad Castle. 

The cardboard version was clearly not a “Real Castle”. What about now, after 100 years in stone? 

The Costs

Upon entering St. Stephen’s Basilica, one may light a candle for either 300 HUF or 1€. This conversion is the closest-to-accurate HUF-to-EUR I’ve encountered in Hungary. The Catholic Church does its math. 

Just outside the Basilica, one of the staff members instructs you to remove your hat. 

The Christian god, evidently, is offended if He cannot see the top of your head. The Jewish god, I hear, is offended if He can. Many people say this is the same god. 

I’m curious what happens if a Jew with a yarmulke walks in. 

A yarmulke is a hat. The instructions say “No hats”. 

Perhaps a yarmulke is a Hat that is not a hat. 

To enter the Basilica, one must pay 2700HUF (around $9), unless you’re a religious person (with certificate) or a pilgrim (with certificate). 

I wonder what price I could get for certificates sold at the door. 

If arrested, I would have to tell the police that my certificates are not fake; they are merely Certificates.