What's That in Your Cup?

"Oh I like coffee / And I like tea / I'd like to be able to enter a final plea" -- John Popper (Blues Traveler), "Run Around"

Tomorrow, I'll walk into my office a bit bleary-eyed with one of two items perched in the curled fingers of my left hand -- a cup of hot beverage from either Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks.

Reactions will work accordingly -- an Extra Large "Great One" cup of Dunkin Donuts will bring smiles and sympathetic looks that say, "Hey, sir, tough morning?" or "Hey, El-Tee, you gettin properly caffeinated for a day of briefings?" Because my Dunkin Donuts cup won't be the only one at the morning meeting, there will be at least one or two instances where at least two of us Dunkin Drinkers will make eye contact and knowingly just tilt our cups toward one another in brotherhood before giving a quick smirk and returning to the sipping and waking up process.

Starbucks, however, is an entirely different story. With a similarly-sized, equally prominent cup of Starbucks in hand, I literally would not be able to make it from my office to the head without being teased or even jeered at least once. An epithet or two might be thrown my way if I were seen sipping from said cup during the aforementioned morning meeting. I could just as easily be met with sarcastic comments to the tune of, "Well, if we'd known that about you, we could've brought you a fluffed pillow and a mint this morning" or something else equally un-funny/un-original.

Okay, okay, so you get the point -- Dunkin Donuts is somehow associated with all things masculine and blue-collar, while Starbucks is associated with all those bad things that people like Spiro Agnew used to get hot and bothered about.

That's certainly not unique to my command, or even to New England. Popular TV commercials for both McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts have sought to make fun of Starbucks in not so many words, what with their silly Italian words for sizes and their ten-syllable drink names.

But let's look at the evidence, shall we?

Price. Let's assume here that frugality is manly and indulgence is for the effete. In this category, Starbucks wins by a country mile. (And for that matter, Brew'd Awakening beats 'em both, but that only works if you happen to be in downtown Lowell). As someone who's done more than his share of "coffee or tea and a bagel with cream cheese" breakfasts, Starbucks charges roughly $1.50 less than Dunkin (notwithstanding a current Dunkin special whereby the bagel and cream cheese can be had for $.99 with drink purchase). In fact, for the same price that I'd pay for just the Extra Large Tea/Coffee and bagel with cream cheese at the 24/7 Dunkin on Central Street, I can get the drink, the food, and the out-of-area New York Times (because hey, if we're pre-Thursday, that crossword is actually doable) at Starbucks off 290 in Worcester and still come out slightly ahead.

All bets are off, of course, if you do order those super-special ten-syllable drinks, but for the standard morning cup, this is certifiably true (and easily verifiable).

Consumer Effort. Let's assume here that "Do-It-Yourself" is manly and being waited on is for the effete. Again, advantage Starbucks. At nearly every Dunkin Donuts that I know, the sugar, cream, milk, etc. are kept behind the service counter. Not so at Starbucks. Whether you're into Splenda, Sugar in the Raw, honey, or none of the above, at Starbucks you're the doer. They just leave it out and trust you with it -- that's hard to argue with.

Caffeination. Let's assume here that heavy caffeination makes you a badass (hey, I've seen enough Mountain Dew and Red Bull commericals to know that!) and health concerns are for the effete. Yup, you guessed it, Starbucks takes this one seven days a week, and twice on Sunday. As you can easily check with one or two Google searches, Starbucks coffee is essentially "spiked" with surplus caffeine. Per unit volume, it's roughly twice as strong as the brew that Dunkin serves. If it's tea that suits your fancy, the Tazo Awake tea is definitely stronger than the generic Dunkin bag of Earl Grey, too.

So, no, I'm not a die-hard Starbucks partisan, or even a shareholder. I did become a huge fan of theirs when I lived in Virginia Beach, though, as I noticed that they were sort of like a library for me, except with way better hours, better amenities, and no "shushing" after my cell phone rang.

But I make the point just as a way of turning a piece of conventional "wisdom" on its head.

What could be more fun than that?

Matt Cassel's Quick Kick

Yes, Virginia, it's possible to lose all sixteen games in an NFL season (thanks to the sacrificial Lions who taught us that yesterday).

And yes, Virginia, it's possible to win eleven games and still not make the playoffs (And really, I hope someone in San Diego or Arizona feels at least a little bit guilty).

And yes, once again, it really is possible to punt in a non-fourth down setting, as Matt Cassel expertly reminded us yesterday during the Pats' shutout of the Bills.

So here was the situation: It's third-and-eight. The Pats have the ball on their own 41 as the fourth quarter is winding down and a two-score lead to protect. What does Bill Belichick decide to do?

Rather than make the umpteenth up-the-middle dive that would not likely yield eight yards, or risk throwing the ball on the windiest day of the year, the Pats' coach yanked out the old "quick kick" from the playbook in order to try to bury the unexpecting Bills deep in their own territory.

So, from the shotgun, the former high school punter Matt Cassel boomed a 57-yard punt (well, 57 with the healthy Pats' roll), which a gaggle of guys in white jerseys downed on the two yard-line before stopping the Buffalo offense and securing the win.

I've seen a bunch of online comments of the "Why-the-heck-would-you-give-the-ball-up-on-third variety" which is at least (slightly) better than people trying to argue that "there's no such thing" as a third-down punt.

By doing it, you benefit massively from the element of surprise. Your opponent's lack of preparedness means you have a great chance to set your defense up with wonderful field position, or, better yet, to yield a turnover deep in enemy territory should anyone on the other team touch, but not recover, the ball. On a very non-offensive day (such as yesterday where only 13 total points were scored) that can be a very good thing.

Bill Belichick will always be remembered as one of football's great coaches not just for the results his squads have posted but because he's a true student of the game who relishes in the wonderful opportunities presented by things like unexpected fourth-down plays from scrimmage, fake special teams plays, unusual formations, and yes, the occasional quick kick.

Somewhere yesterday, John Elway and Randall Cunningham had to be smiling.

Watch more YouTube videos on AOL Video

Using All Four Downs to the State Title..

http://highschool.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=892888

A high school football story this week really caught my eye. It comes out of Pulaski, Arkansas, and it's about a high school football coach, Kevin Kelley, who decided he simply would not punt the ball, no matter what. The best part? His team just took home a state title.

The neat thing about the article is that the coach's reasoning wasn't coming from some Disney-esque "Never Say Die" cliche-book, or some stubbornness that bore no fruit (like the opposing college basketball coach who decided to always double-team Steph Curry, even when he just stood out in the corner, thereby giving Davidson a 4-on-3 "power play" every time down the court).

Instead, he did a lot of rigorous statistical analysis of the conversion percentages on fourth down, the distance that punts travel in high school games, the average returns, etc. and when he crunched all the numbers, came to his reasonable conclusion, despite the inevitable guffaws and eye-rolls that surely came from his own stands and sidelines when he said he was "sticking" on fourth-and-long deep in his own territory.

Also of interest was his decision to onside kick approximately 75% of the time. Again, he had numbers to back him up, and he has the results to prove that he was onto something. Reading about it took me right back to Michael Lewis' wonderful Moneyball, a true page-turner which appealed right down the middle of my sports fanatic and analytical sides.

I'm sure a lot of other coaches and administrators were upset with Mr. Kelley because of his unorthodoxy that must've seemed unfair somehow.

But I wholeheartedly congratulate his success (just as I do every time I see something neat like a third-down "quick kick" or a real fourth-down punt set up to look like a fake), because of the lesson he's sending to his players.

Innovate. Work within the rules that society lays down, but when you see room for clever, new interpretations of those rules, seize the opportunity. As much as the cliche will make some people cringe, think outside the familiar rectangular object.

If you've been given four downs, take them. Use them. Just because everyone else punts on fourth doesn't mean you have to.

When you study the lives of any great inventor (say, a Thomas Edison) or even just an innovator (Warren Buffett) you'll see a common theme emerge -- they saw things for what they could be, followed their hunches, and changed the way others thought.

I was just looking at the e-mail signature quote from Kathleen Marcin, Lowell DNA President, and here it is, straight from Albert Einstein: "Great spirits have always encountered
violent opposition from mediocre minds."

I'm sure Coach Kelley can relate.

And the princple, of course, goes way beyond a bunch of teenagers in Arkansas.

Social Capital Goes Global

"What could have been a huge problem disappeared because Denny knew the generals over there and called and said, 'Hey, we know each other, let's work this thing out,'" said Haines.

The above quote comes from today's Baltimore Sun piece titled, "Forged in the crucible of Annapolis" which notes that three members of the USNA class of 1968 (Mike Mullen, Jim Webb, and Dennis Blair) now hold, or will soon hold, key positions in the highest echelons of our government.

The potentially "huge problem" the quote refers to, though, was that little incident that occurred back in April 2001 when an EP-3E (P-3 airframe) modified to conduct certain, uh...collections, had a nasty aerial encounter with two Chinese intercept planes that wound up with one Chinese plane and pilot "buying the farm" and an expensive and sensitive U.S. airframe crash-landed on Hainan Island (just off the Chinese mainland in the South China Sea).

And just to comprehend the significance of the quote (which comes from Admiral Blair's college roommate), when he talks about Blair 'knowing the generals' he's not referring to a bunch of American flag officers over at PACOM headquarters on Oahu...he's talking about Chinese generals.

That's pretty powerful stuff.

Just through the contacts he had developed over the years, but mostly through those he had developed as a four-star in charge of our largest (geography-wise) theater command, he developed enough of a personal relationship with China's shot-callers to be able to help defuse a situation that could have gotten very ugly, very fast had a few critical indicators gone the other way.

This kind of makes you think of General Zinni back when he was CENTCOM, or about the way people describe Bush the Elder when he put the Gulf War coalition together (based on Bush's previous governmental postings, he literally knew most of the key world leaders whose support he needed to oust the Iraqi Army from Kuwait).

To me, it's also a reminder of why practitioners are often better leaders and problem solvers than are pure theoreticians. When a global crisis does erupt, I would take a Tony Zinni, a Dennis Blair, or a Colin Powell any day of the week, and twice on Sunday before all the eggheads from The Fletcher School, the Kennedy School, and SAIS put together.

Of course, like anything, too much elbow-rubbing can have a downside, as John recently pointed out on a comment to a Right-Side-of-Lowell post (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3046628493283608233&postID=6874853412305370328) when he mentioned how Admiral Blair's relationship with the Indonesian government didn't exactly wind up well for the East Timorese, who, I have no doubt, weren't so much concerned with Mr. Blair's level of "hard" or "soft" social capital as they were with the persecution they faced at the hands of a military dictatorship.

I'm sure many friends of the Tibetans and the Taiwanese won't be huge fans of the appointment, either.

Still, it's nice to think that anytime the proverbial three-in-the-morning phone call starts with "How are the wife and kids?" the chance that someone on one end will then try to kill the person on the other end after hanging up seems somehow diminished.

And that can't be all bad!

Malcolm Gladwell, Social Capital, the 'Roseto Effect,' and Lowell

In Malcolm Gladwell's new bestseller about success, Outliers, Gladwell opens bytalking about social capital, which also just so happens to be first-ever entry on this blog. Gladwell never explicitly uses the term social capital, but it's definitely no accident that he begins with a chapter about a town called Roseto, Pennsylvania, which presented a major health mystery to researchers in the 1950s.

What was going on?

On page 7, Gladwell notes that,

"In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected."

Gladwell goes on to quote John Bruhn, a researcher who studied Roseto:

"There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't even have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."

After the medical researchers systematically studied -- and then eliminated -- diet, exercise, genetics, and environmental conditions, the reason they wound up citing for Roseto's "outlier" status was the town itself.

From page 9:

"As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures."

A skeptical medical community had to be won over to see an explanation that veered away from hard, numbers-based facts, but the case was compelling. Put simply, social capital matters.
And social capital, put simply, is who you know. It's the community that exists all around you -- your building, your neighborhood, your civic organizations, your place of worship, your Tae Kwon Do class, your softball league, or whatever.

One distinction worth noting here is that between what I call 'hard' versus 'soft' social capital. One is not necessarily 'better' than the other, but there is a difference, and it does matter. 'Hard' social capital refers to people you know and who you're connected to by something greater than both of you put together. A perfect example would be someone you know from your church. You belong to the parish. They do, too. It would continue to exist if you both stopped existing, and it meets regularly on a schedule that depends on neither of you. Chances are, no matter how busy you are during the week (and if we'll define 'busy' as having more items on your to-do list than you can usually complete, let's just accept that yes, we're all busy people), you'll still see each other on Sunday morning at 1000. Same would go for your co-workers, your family members, and, presumably, co-members of civic groups or bowling leagues.

Soft social capital, as you might guess, refers to the (usually) more tenuous connections to people you 'just sort of know.' They could be people you run into at your local coffee shop, people that live in your building, people you sometimes see at the gym or the bus stop, etc. Again, not necessarly any better or worse types of linkages, but the key distinction is that there's not really any great tie that binds you on a regular basis. If one of you simply moved, changed gyms, or stopped drinking coffee, you could easily lose touch completely, no matter how positive your mutual feelings might be. As I'm starting to see college friendships fade into the distance as things like jobs, marriages, and children start to come into the picture, I'm realizing that the distinction bears noting.

Anyway, enough on that sidebar. I'm going to e-mail Robert Putnam (author of 'Bowling Alone' and one of the first to popularize the phrase 'social capital') to see if it can make its way into the lexicon. I'll let you know how it goes..

So back to Roseto, and then to Lowell.

Malcolm Gladwell made clear that, based on the Roseto Effect, high levels of social capital -- hard and soft -- can have a positive effect on a person's physical as well as mental well-being.
And I can certainly tell you how true the opposite is. Understanding how important finding a sense of community is -- not just to me, but to anyone -- is reason enough to try to explain why I don't find the prospect of a twenty-plus year active duty career fulfilling. Simply put, I just don't want to bounce around to a new city every two to three years for what otherwise might be shaping up to be the best years of my life.

As for places to settle down, Lowell continues to amaze me. I know I've said it before, but I think small cities are really the way to go for anyone looking to find a community where they can belong and find their niche, whatever it is. Big cities are usually too anonymous and transient; small towns don't offer enough, and might be too insular.

But something tells me that not all small cities are created alike. Everytime I feel like I know what's available and what's going on in Lowell, I tend to turn over another rock and find out about more downtown social events, more charity fund-raisers, more volunteer opportunities (Channel 10 has been an interesting source of this stuff, or what military types might call 'all-source intelligence'). No offense to New England's other cities of comparable size/population -- I admit that I don't get the same access level just by driving through and sometimes stopping to read their local paper -- but the overwhelming sense I get is that it's 'just not' like that.

I don't think Lowell is about to become the next Roseto, Pennsylvania anytime soon. Obviously, times have changed, the family structure has changed, influences have changed, and so has society. I don't even have the medical proof that Gladwell cites to draw my own conclusions from. But what I can tell you is this -- when you've done the strip-mall-and-box-store-subdivisions-jammed-between-eight-lane-road thing and seen what it means to go without social capital, and then you've spent the better part of a year seeing what a second option -- real downtown architecture and high levels of civic engagement -- looks like, here's the big realization you come away with:

That second option is pretty damn cool.

Fareed Zakaria on the Hush Puppy Hurler

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/19/zakaria.iraqshoes/index.html?iref=newssearch

Fareed Zakaria's recent column on the now-infamous 'Shoe Thrower,' Mr. Munthadhar al-Zaidi of the al-Baghdadia network says it simply, and says it best.

The current costs of the Iraq War are fresh in the minds of Iraqis -- they are very real, and they are very painful. Virtually every person in Iraq --save a few isolated pockets of Muthanna Province in the south and some of the all-Kurdish areas in the north, has lost an immediate or extended family member in the Troubles that began in 2003. Mr. al-Zaidi expressed a lot of those peoples' frustrations with a war they never asked for against a series of enemies (first the U.S., then either local thugs or sectarian militias) that, individually at least, they never provoked.

However, (hey, you had to know there was a 'but' coming here) the very fact that someone felt empowered to do this, and has since met a quite un-Ba'athist fate (i.e. one shot through the head just before your family gets charged for the bullet) shows something about the burgeoning openness of a society that went without things like civil society and democracy for years.
As Mr. Zakaria points out, we won't know for many years how history will view Operation Iraqi Freedom, but there is much more reason for hope than many critics who, I believe, are STILL trapped in a March 18, 2003 mindset concerning the entire endeavor would be willing to admit.

One of my neighbors made a great point about the shoe incident last night at one of our little floor get-togethers (long live the spirit of 200 Market St.!) -- the inclusion of the insult 'you dog' definitely took away from the poignancy of the act. Just as the sole of a shoe is considered extremely low/dirty in Arab culture (it's rude to even cross your legs in a way that exposes your sole to others in a meeting), the word 'dog' is considered an insult on the level of any of our four-letter beauties). If Mr. Al-Zaidi had just said, "This is for you on behalf of the widows and orphans," the disobedience would have been, well, a bit more civil.

A fair point, indeed.

The Newest Field Manual: Full-Spectrum Ops

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jJBH34CjQm_I2wfwFWevZKNUhfogD954D8GG1
I read in the Early Bird this morning that the Army has just released its first new training field manual since 2002. Its title is "Training for Full Spectrum Operations" and it's based on the idea that today's (and tomorrow's!) soldier must be just as ready to kill you as he is to hug you...or at least to provide security on your street and help fix your infrastructure.

As you might guess, the Civil Affairs branch plays in hugely here (not that I'm biased or anything). Here is what Ike Skelton had to say:

"It's asking a lot of soldier, but today's environment is so different than World War II or Korea," said Skelton, D-Mo. "It deals with civil affairs. We have not been as active militarily in civil affairs in recent years. This puts it front and center."

This basically echoes what Robert Gates just wrote about in Foreign Affairs -- for conflicts in our era, our ability to kick down doors may not be as vital to victory as will be our ability to promote civil society, security, and infrastructure.

Some China-phobes and Russo-phobes may fear that we're too busy "fighting the current war" or the "last war" and will risk losing focus on near-peer competitors.

I VERY strongly disagree. For proof, just look at where so much of the Pentagon's money goes.

Our ability to understand foreign cultures and stabilize war-torn countries does not have to come at the expense of our ability to "break things and kill people." Thankfully, the generals quoted in the article seem to feel the same way.

One other thing worth mentioning: the new field manual highlights the need for readiness to respond to Katrina-esque or other types of domestic disaster scenarios. And therein lies the beauty of the National Guard -- while operating under a state governor's authority, we're not subject to that pesky little Reconstruction-era law called posse comitatus that restricts the military from conducting domestic law enforcement operations.