I’ll Give You Ten Hundred Dollars For St. James Place

It had been far too long since I last visited the bizarre world of the Nizam household, but all the necessary elements were in place…late night shopping trip after which I ate two bags of kettle corn, a box of sushi, some extraneous chicken, and an entire box of blackberries? Yes! Haris’s mysterious arrival at around 3 in the morning from who knows what nefarious errand? You bet. Waking up to the frightening mutterings of at least one Urdu-speaking aunt of questionable sanity? Feels like home!

Next morning, Sana and Arman (who are now 8 and 6…I can’t believe how fast time goes) were home from school, Sana because she is always sick and Arman because why not. Sana is some sort of volatile mixture of Daenerys Targaryen and Franklin D. Roosevelt…authority comes naturally to her, she is compelling, intelligent, and domineering…and her toughness hides a fragile sickly person that I hope grows into more health as she ages. Teddy Roosevelt was a sickly child wasn’t he?

In the early afternoon, board games were determined to be the order of the day, and six capitalists got out the Nizam’s (as expected) very nice but incomplete Monopoly set (I’ll be the horse’s body, you be the stand it came on, and this Jack of Spades is Waterworks): myself, Nida, two young cousins (I’m terrible at ages, but 5th and 3rd grade I think) Fehraz and Amir…I’m fairly certain I spelled Fehraz wrong, so I hope Nida will correct me, Sana, and Arman.

Arman, who had never played before, got off to a frankly torrid start, buying up a couple railroads and New York Avenue, while I could not seem to land on anything that wasn’t already owned. Actually, the only property I managed to acquire by the traditional means of landing on it was Illinois Avenue.

Little children can roll dice and acquire properties as well as anyone, and they were surprisingly competent at the monetary dealings of the game (I was banker, as I always request to be), but where things threatened to make the game interesting and perhaps farcical were in the realm of trading. Sana, owner of St. Charles Place, wished to acquire States Avenue (or maybe it was the other way around, but who cares) from Arman, who declared that he would not part with it for less than 900 dollars. Amir was fond of offering 1 dollar for his brother’s entire investment portfolio, and it was clear that Park Place and Boardwalk were virtually priceless. When Fehraz landed on Park Place, he declared to Amir that he would only sell it for all of Amir’s remaining money and properties. And this while Boardwalk was still unclaimed!

Arman, via fortunate rolling and a key trade with Amir (only a few hundred dollars for his last orange for the monopoly…a common theme was a lack of consistent market value), acquired all the oranges and began improving on them with houses, becoming a clear leader in the game, and he knew it. “I have six properties!”

When you are playing Monopoly and you are losing to your six-year-old brother, do you:
A: Play fair, while praising his abilities
B: Help him win
C: Attempt to take advantage of his youthful trust by offering him below market value for his two railroads while asserting that “it’s the best offer you’re going to get”

Yes, if you are our favorite pint-sized Pakistani, diminutive Desi, sub-five foot subcontinental, miniscule Muslim, etc. ad infinitum, you chose answer C. To be fair, Nida later deliberately overpaid Arman for Mediterranean Avenue, but the karmic damage was done.

Meanwhile, houses were piling up on the Oranges, Sana fortuitously landed on Virginia Avenue to complete her monopoly, and I desperately overpaid Nida for Indiana Avenue so at least I would have two properties.

But still Boardwalk lay unclaimed, and its prospective owner could hold out hope of either a) uniting the Dark Blue Duo him or herself or at least b) Demanding exorbitant sums from Fehraz to pair it with Park Place. So who should land on Boardwalk but, of course, Arman, by this point richer than the Lannisters although his disorganized bankroll left open the question of exactly what his net worth might be. Fehraz sought to prey on the six-year-old, offering him about 275 dollars for Boardwalk, and then offering Ventnor Avenue or something like that (look, a property for a property!). Arman, after being advised by the banker that he was the one in the catbird seat here, decided not to sell Boardwalk and to purchase Park Place once he had acquired “six of these, so 3000 dollars”, pointing to his stack of five hundred dollar bills. It was as cute from a six-year-old as it would be annoying from an adult.

One turn, I landed on New York Avenue with one house, paying Arman the entirely reasonable price of 90 dollars. On his next turn, he chose to upgrade the properties to three houses. On my roll, I needed a two for the lucky monopoly on Kentucky Avenue, but even if that unlikely event didn’t occur I would be out of the woods for a time. The roll? A three. The space? Chance. The card? Go back. Three spaces. 600 dollars rent on New York Avenue, meaning immediate mortgaging of my two feeble properties.

Arman was a generous overlord, offering to defer my debts (and those of others) and even loaning me forty dollars for unclear but very cute reasons. When he bankrupted me on a hotel a few turns later and thus landed the two red properties, it was already clear that the game was soon to end. He got Kentucky Avenue, and was able to build hotels all in one go (1800 dollars to Arman was nothing at that point). A six-year-old, destroying us all as a titan of business.

This got me thinking about the mathematics of Monopoly, as I have done so several times before. I can’t find the notebook in which I performed this analysis some years ago, but what better way to spend an afternoon than to redo it? More forthcoming as Nida and I once again try to revive this dormat blog.

We’ve Got A Situation, Part II

Hold on, I’m not done talking about The Situation.

On Episode 6 of Season 2 of Jersey Shore (“Not So Shore”), the housemates reversed the usual pattern of having the men (spearheaded by the bizarrely competent Situation) cook after Sammi had offered that the women would cook the next meal. A significant subplot of the episode was the guys’ strong conviction that the girls wouldn’t be remotely able to pull off the task of preparing dinner, some of the funniest moments of the episode were Jenni and Snooki’s ineptitudes at the grocery store, and when the girls actually did manage to make a decent penne alla vodka (delicious), the general reaction was one of surprise and slightly condescending praise. Now I’m going to plagiarize a conversation I had with my mom driving home from Montreal (to visit Nida, actually).

What does it mean that the females on Jersey Shore were expected to be completely incompetent in the kitchen? Why is the Situation a good cook? It could be just that Jenni, Snooki, Sammi, and Angelina are particularly a) spoiled, b) stupid, c) lazy, or all three, although Jenni did take control of the meal preparation pretty admirably. But it could also be symptomatic of a female backlash against certain aspects of domesticity in the still (incredibly) relatively new era of at least attempting gender equality.

Young women and young men are being told, correctly, that women and men should have equal opportunities in the workforce and that the era of housewives and “don’t bother Dad, he’s in the study” and “Gee Wally” is obsolete and flawed. And this is all very good. But I wonder if it leads to boys thinking “I need to be a new, enlightened, pro-feminism man and learn how to cook” and girls thinking “I am a strong woman unshackled by the constraints of the domestic. Cooking and being in the kitchen and such housewife-ly things are insulting and beneath me. I’m not going to cook, and my man is just going to have to accept that.” I have known women of the second position, and I am certainly a man of the first.

My mom then pointed out that this development would make life much more difficult for men, because they certainly aren’t expected to work any less hard than men did in the 50′s and 60′s, but they are now expected to help around the house, to cook their fair share, to engage their wives and children in conversation without just going into their den with a cigar to be left undisturbed with the evening paper (obviously not, nobody reads the newspaper anymore). I agreed that this was true, but then realized that life is more difficult for women now too, because they are generally encouraged to work outside the home and usually do so just as hard as men do, but are also supposed to maintain their households and usually be the primary caretakers of their children.

You know the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel work in the chocolate factory and Ricky and Fred try to clean the apartments? If you don’t, basically the wives and husbands belittle each other’s professions and each declare that the one is easier than the other. They switch places, fail hilariously (Lucy frantically eating the chocolates off the assembly line is a classic television moment), and in the end agree that they are best suited for their own clearly defined roles. Seen today, this seems laughably outdated and uncomfortably sexist. But, in a way, isn’t there kind of a point to it? Or am I crazy? In the old days, men had men’s roles and women had women’s roles. These days, everybody tries to do everything, and I think it means that people spend less time with their kids. Which is nobody’s fault. And I’m not some chauvinist reactionary. I think that women and men should have equal work opportunities always, and I’m obsessively respectful of women possibly to a fault. But I think you could argue that “women” in general took chunks of time that used to be devoted to children and cooking and brought it into the workforce without a corresponding shift from men of comparable magnitude, and that childrearing and healthy eating have lost more and more time to both the men and women of capitalism.

Maybe everything will all balance out some day, and sexism will be truly dead, and I won’t worry that what I’ve just said was anti-women working, because it wasn’t. As Dave Barry once said, the fairest solution would be to “have the men do the cooking and housework for the next six thousand years or so.” We’ll start with The Situation.

We’ve Got A Situation, Part I

How many people can you think of that completely own a word? Meaning, when you say that word, you will think of that person, even if you’re not trying to. It has to be a normal non-invented word in common parlance, so not something like “Newspeak” or “Orc.” I don’t mean a name, like how anybody named Adolf makes you think of Hitler or Winston makes you think of Churchill.

I bring this up because I know that whenever I hear the word “situation” for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of my life, I will think of a self-obsessed former fitness center manager who allegedly fake tans every day and who will apparently make 5 million dollars this year.

In the first season of Jersey Shore, The Situation injected himself into every plotline, relentlessly insistent that every woman he met would be immediately entranced by his “situation” (abs). His arrogance was appalling, his bravado almost sickening at first. This is how the man became famous.

But, if you’ve watched every episode of both seasons of Jersey Shore (which I have, and will never be ashamed to admit), you may have noticed something remarkable about Michael Sorrentino: he has actually almost receded into the background! Now the most famous (well, him or Snooki) and presumably best-paid of the cast, he has settled down to the point that a) I actually count on him to provide some of the wisest cast-member perspective on what’s going on in the house and b) At this moment (26 minutes into the most recent episode, because I paused it to write this situation), he is probably the first or second LEAST controversial character in the house! Either him or Pauly D.

Sorry, I seem to have fallen into the weird Jersey Shore convention of unnecessarily appending the terms “in the house” or “right now” or both to every sentence. Angelina sounds like an unimaginative early 90s rapper. We get it, you’re in the house.

Back to the Situation situation. If Sorrentino is not a complete idiot and arrogant beyond reason (and I don’t think he is), and if these were the qualities which made him a breakout star (which I believe they are), they mean something troubling and truly amazing to consider in a vacuum: A young man with apparently mediocre prospects transformed himself into a bombastic caricature of assholeishness for a period of a few months, and as a direct result of this transformation is now 1) a recognizable celebrity, 2) a millionaire, and 3) in ownership of a noun. But the key difference between the Situation and Snooki, the second most famous Jersey Shore cast member/character (not coincidentally, the two whose absurd nicknames stuck…someone should write about why and how Situation and Snooki worked as names while Sweetheart and J-WOWW did not. Notice how nobody calls her J-WOWW anymore? I would like to figure this out). Long parenthetical. I’m awful with those. Restarting sentence.

The key difference between the Situation and Snooki is that Snooki has not largely abandoned her original caricatured identity, which says to me that either Snooki is not as intelligent as the Situation or that she is in fact that person. Maybe she is, since there’s that ridiculous story of her public intoxication and her screaming “I’m Snooki! You can’t do this to me!” or something like that. But the Situation milked his persona for all it was worth, and now is able, against all odds, to actually settle in as a (relatively) nice guy! Amazing.

I don’t really have a point here, except to say that when you saw the title of this post, I bet you knew immediately that I was going to talk about Jersey Shore and Michael Sorrentino in particular. And that’s an unbelievable testament to his power.