TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I didn’t actually watch this last week when it debuted because I wasn’t ready to start burning through television yet.
Fox’s K-Ville is a cop show set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Anthony Anderson’s Martin Boulet is a cop who was abandoned by his partner during the Katrina clean-up. Two years later Boulet is cracking under the pressure of fighting a losing battle in the city. Cole Hauser plays his recently arrived partner Trevor Cobb.

• Pros
  • It’s a cop show not set in New York. Bonus points for originality.
  • The idea of dramatizing the crime in New Orleans is a good one. Although it will be interesting to see how they dramatize it. Smash & grab crime isn’t really interesting. I’d rather all of them not be about how much the rich white folk are trying to stick it to the Ninth Ward. That might get old quickly.
  • Ethan and Bernard from Lost found work.
• Cons
  • The show is about as stereotypical a cop show as it comes. The mis-matched partners who don’t trust each other at first but then become buddies toward the end. They form a shaky partnership at the end and Boulet agrees to keep Cobb’s dark secret: when the flood hit he was in prison, but since all of New Orleans’ computer records were wiped out, he was able to make a fresh start.
  • The characters in the pilot come off as sterotyped as every cop movie ever. Boulet and Cobb are the cops who operate outside the box and they have the typical chief who hates their procedure but respects their results. I’ve seen this movie before.
  • Parts of the show ring even less true than standard cop shows. After the first assault on a fund-raiser, the new partners take to the streets in a car chase. They’re shooting at the car they’re chasing… on the freeway. Probably not the safest thing to do.
  • The premise that all of New Orleans criminal records were gone and all the criminals that were in the prisons just had to walk out the doors to be free seems like a bit of a stretch. I mean, I know it’s a convenient backstory and everything and makes for an interesting character, but I think it probably can be explained a little better. It maps out a lot of future episodes. Someone else on the force finds out. Some officer remembers him. His old contacts expose him. His partner lords it over his head.

Final Thought: One more episode next week to give me something to care about. After that it’s off the list.

One quote to take away: “There’s more loose ends here than a whore-house.”

Freakonomics: A Rouge Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner can be summed up thusly: It’s that book that claimed abortion reduced crime… and oh did the talking heads flip out.

I’m not sure what other motivation one would need to check this book out. Surprisingly, this was on my bookshelf and not on by BookFlix list. Ms. L has a tendency to buy books of half.com. Why, I have no idea. I think she likes clutter.

Steven Levitt is introduced as “the most brilliant economist in the country.” He also admits in the opening pages that he’s really not good at economics. Instead, he uses statistics and financial models to try and solve the regular riddles of every day life. For example: If no expert was able to forcibly prove why crime dropped, why did it? Why do the homes of real estate agents always sell for more than their clients’ homes? How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents? How much does a name hinder your child’s future?

The book is broken out into six chapters, with each chapter addressing a different mystery. Chapters one and two are more table setting than ground-breaking. The first chapter addresses people’s tendency to cheat and studies how it can be prevented. How one can strike the correct balance of social, moral, and economic incentives to stop people from cheating. The second chapter, “How Is The Ku Klux Clan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents?” addresses the theory of information imbalance. That is: when you go to a realtor, especially before the dawn of the Internet, he had you at a complete and total disadvantage. He knows what houses in the area are really worth. He knows what the seller really wants. He probably has a pretty good idea of the trends in the neighborhood. But he doesn’t have to tell you. How were they like the KKK? It delves into the story of a guy who joined the KKK simply to find out their secrets. Information imbalance again: once everyone knew everything about the inner workings of the group, it lost a lot of its power.

These two chapters set-up the tools he’ll use for the rest of the book. They show the way that Levitt collects his data and the questions that he poses to assess the problem. The third chapter, “Why Do So Many Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers?”, is an attack on the idea of “conventional wisdom.” He brings up instances of experts who create numbers and statistics and the idea that if something is repeated enough times and confirmed enough by the media, it becomes the truth. Together with information gathering and the vivisection of conventional wisdom, he gives some new insight into old arguments.

As for the abortion and crime association? It’s not that crazy. He begins with a history lesson. The ruler of Romania, declaring his country would be a bastion of New Communism, changed his country’s abortion policy from anything goes to completely illegal along with contraception. He then proceeded to neglect agriculture for manufacturing. All the children who were born were born to families who couldn’t afford them. When people are poor, they resort to crime. The very children who likely would have never been born in Romania were the ones whom eventually brought the ruler in front of a firing squad. So what Levitt did was to compare the abortion rates to the crime rate and discovered their was a correlation. In states like New York and California, where abortion was legal before Roe vs. Wade came along, crime rates dropped sooner than in states which didn’t allow abortion. Certainly a controversial topic but also one that is built on attacking conventional wisdom… that is, the 8 general explanations that people try to pass off as the true explanation.

The final two chapters kind of lost me. It goes off into questions about parenting. It addresses the things a parent does to encourage their children to learn and, surprisingly, it turns out that you can buy your kids all the books you want, but if you don’t actually read them they don’t help. It then goes off into a fun chapter about baby names and how some of the more interesting names in the African-American community may hinder a child more than help it. It goes through naming trends and mentions some doozies: including Temptress (Incorrectly after Tempestt Bledsoe), Amcher (named for the first thing the mother saw after birth), Shithead (pronounced shuh-TEED), brothers Winner and Loser, and brothers OrangeJello (a-RON-zhello) and LemonJello (la-MON-zhello). It sadly does not mention lil Apple Paltrow, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, or Suri Cruise.

This book is definitely to be read with an open mind. If you are completely and totally anti-abortion and that’s the only thing you’re reading for, you’ll certainly hate it. The reader gets a decent look at ways to solve problems by thinking outside the box; something most people in this country are so morbidly lacking.

Solid recommendation. Instead of returning it to the library, I will now set it back on the shelf to collect dust for all eternity.