Sampling the Sam Adams Brewmaster's Collection

Two days ago I bought a twelve pack of the Samuel Adams "Brewmaster's Collection", in which you get a couple of bottles of the flagship Boston Lager, along with two each of five specialty brews (this collection is obviously a seasonal one, consisting entirely of dark, full-bodied brews thought especially suitable for cold weather consumption). Today I tried one of each of the five heavyweights, with these results:

Honey Porter: Typical rich porter flavor, with, as advertised, a hint of honey. This had spent several hours in the fridge, and might have been better served just slightly chilled.

Black Lager: Rich but bland; might also have benefited from less refrigeration.

Scotch Ale: According to the label, this is made with peat-roasted barley like that used to make Scotch Whisky. The smoky flavor comes through, but the hops are a bit strident.

Irish Red: Great hop/barley balance; a well-crafted ale.

Brown Ale: Fascinating counterplay of caramel and citrus. My favorite of the lot.

Christmas eve thoughts of a wanna-believer.

Two Sundays ago, at a festive mass of lessons and carols, the Grace Church choir sang this:

Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long.
And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took,
As clerkës finden written
In their book.
Nor had one apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Then had never Our Lady
A-been heaven's queen.
Blessed be the time
That apple taken was.
Therefore we may singen
Deo gratias!

This wasn't the first time I'd heard this Chaucerian-era song, but it was the first that I'd focused on its meaning: that Original Sin, the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, was an occasion for thanks to God, because it allowed for Mary to become queen of heaven. In other words, no Fall, no need for redemption, and consequently no need for Mary to give birth to God's son so that he might, by sacrifice on the cross, atone for humanity's sins.

So, what if Eve hadn't fallen for the serpent's persuasion? One of the punishments inflicted by God for her and Adam's transgression is, "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." Were the primordial couple thus to be immortal so long as they refrained from this defiance of divine authority? Another punishment, inflicted on Eve, was painful childbirth. Does this mean that, absent the Fall, she would have been the beneficiary of a divine epidural? Or does it mean that the original intent was for her never to have children; indeed, for her to be Adam's helpmate, but not his bedmate? According to Genesis, after the Fall, they first were embarrassed by their nakedness before each other. This introduces a notion of sexual tension that hadn't existed before. Somehow, we seem to equate "original sin" with sex, but Genesis avers that it was the acquisition of knowledge; specifically, the knowledge of good and evil.

Later in Genesis, though, we get an explicit equation of knowledge with sex, in the statement, "Lot knew his wife." From this we get the nudge-and-a-wink expression, "know in the Biblical sense." "Carnal knowledge" is in fact an archaic legal euphemism for sexual intercourse (and also the title of a 1971 movie, starring Ann-Margret, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Jack Nicholson; written by Jules Feiffer and directed by Mike Nichols).

The connection between knowledge and sex is one to which I've alluded before here, and one that's been troubling my mind of late in connection with my fraught relationship with Christianity. I am ever mindful of the tension between belief and intellectuality, and of my resistance to accepting, in the words of the Holy Father (for me, an Episcopalian, a persuasive but not infallible authority), propositions that are not empirically falsifiable. My aversion to "faith" in the sense of unjustified belief, which carries with it as a corollary the spurning of those strands of inquiry which might cast doubt on such belief, is grounded on a visceral resistance to the circumscription of the pursuit of knowledge.

I refer to myself as a "wanna-believer" because I do wish I could believe, not in a Bible-as-literal-truth sense, but at least in a sense that could impart more meaningful content to the liturgy that I practice. With that, I wish you all a merry Christmas.

12/25 update: Did Ted Burke write this poem as an answer to my post? I'd like to think so. Even if, as seems more likely, he didn't, I still like it (as George Plimpton so mellifluously said in that Dry Dock Savings Bank ad in the 1970s) eNORmously.

Yes, I'm still alive.

I've survived my first attempt to teach a continuing legal education seminar to a class of other lawyers (got to be a tough audience); even got some applause at the end. The topic? Oh, yeah: "Ethical issues and the use of the internet." Any questions?

Meanwhile, my wife, the archivist, has given me the schedule for the lectures in the spring 2008 session of the Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar at the Weill Cornell Medical College. They all look very interesting. For those of you in the New York area, these lectures are at 2:00 p.m. on the day indcated, in the Baker Tower Conference Room F-1200, 525 East 68th Street.

January 2, Bradley Collins, Ph.D., Parsons School of Design, "Dysfunctional Holy Families: Loss, Rage and Desire in Renaissance Images of the Virgin and Child."

February 6, Dana Rovang, Doctoral Candidate, University of Chicago, "Habeas Corpus: or, why John Haslam will never get his due."

February 20, Sabine Arnaud, Ph.D., Texas A&M, "An imaginary and fantastick sickness? The narrativization of hysteria in eighteenth century French and English medicine."

March 5, Rev. Curtis Hart, M.Div., Weill Cornell Medical College, "William James' 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' Revisited." (No mention of whether nitrous oxide will be provided.)

March 19 (my 62nd birthday!), Siovahn A. Walker, Doctoral Candidate, Stanford University, "Heaven and Hell as Places in the Mind: Three Twelfth Century Witnesses."

April 2, Sander Gilman, Ph.D., Emory University, "Jews and Alcohol: Genetic and Social Explanations for Jewish Immunity to Alcoholism." (This brings to mind a quip by Al Coblenz, erstwhile part owner of the late, great Lion's Head: "We get an interesting clientele: Jewish drunks, Italian intellectuals and Irish lovers.")

April 16, Barbara F. Leavy, Ph.D., Cornell Weill Medical College, "Did Laius Kill Oedipus? The Continuing Debate."

May 21, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ph.D., Princeton University, "A Brief History of Common Sense." (It would have to be.)

More Bothy Band.

While I'm sure that my earlier post was enough to convince you of their greatness, here they are, circa 1977, doing one of those amazing, I-dare-you-to-sit-still tunes, this one called "Drunken Landlady":

And this is Michael O'Domhnaill singing "Tiocfaidh an Samhradh" ("Summer is Coming"), accompanied by Kevin Burke on fiddle and Donal Lunny on guitar. From the comments on YouTube, I get the sad news that Michael has died. Enjoy his voice, which lives on.

Update: More about Michael here.

First snowfall of the season.

From the foot of Montague Street, looking westward to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the harbor and lower Manhattan.


From the Promenade, looking eastward along Montague Street.

Check out Brain Tracings

Every once in a while I find a blog I think rates special mention as well as a place on my blogroll. The latest is Brain Tracings (Saw This and Thought of....), the creation of an American woman living in London. Her blog is quirky and eclectic, and replete with the sort of off-the-wall connect-the-dots kind of observations I love. Besides, we have similar tastes in music.

Oh, yeah. She did me the honor of putting S-AB on her blogroll before I ever saw Brain Tracings. Trust me, though, this isn't just an instance of, "You scratch my back...."

Please be patient, my friends.

Real life is about to interfere with my blogging time, again. I'll try to post when I can, but it's likely to be a bit spotty until after December 12.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this view of the Manhattan skyline, as seen at dusk from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Near the left, with the pointed top, is Cass Gilbert's masterpiece, the Woolworth Building. Near the right, surmounted by the gilded statue Civic Fame, is McKim, Mead, and White's Municipal Building.


12/2 update: I've learned, via Technorati, that this post and my earlier one about my 10,000th visitor (as well as Louise Crawford's nice post in OTBKB about that), have been linked to in a blog called Gay Stars. As best I can tell, this is because GS aggregates lots of stuff that's not necessarily gay-oriented, including anything that includes the word "boomer." In any event, anything that improves my Technorati authority is greatly appreciated, so, thanks! (Some time back, I saw that my blog was linked to something called Voyeur Porn, and found this was because the author had done a search for "Judy Star" that led him to this post, evidently because of the mention of Fairport Convention's first woman singer, Judy Dyble and the use of the word "star" elsewhere in the post. Mr. Voyeur published the link with the note, "Frankly, not what I was looking for, but you might find it an interesting read.")

A day on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Under a overcast sky, the rising sun illuminates lower Manhattan buildings.


Early in the afternoon, the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia's container vessel Saudi Abha, having just left Red Hook Container Port, turns in the East River to head out Governors Island Channel toward the ocean.


Governors Island and the Bayonne to Staten Island Bridge against the backdrop of a brilliant sunset.

Visitor number 10,000 is from Bexley, Kent, England.

You visited my blog at about 9:30 p.m. your time on 26 November. Your ISP is NTL Internet, your OS is Windows XP, and you browse with Internet Explorer 7.0. To claim your prize (a CD of vintage American R&B), please send me your snail-mail address either by comment to this post, or by e-mail (use the link on my blog profile). Congratulations!

The Hillary action figure is safe.

Postscript to my screed on consequentialism.

I posted earlier on this topic here. Aaron tells why, if you're shot down over enemy-occupied territory, it's much better to take shelter among consequentialists than among deontologists here.

Aaron might similarly appreciate my post here.

Visit number 10,000 is rapidly approaching.

Even with slow traffic over the Thanksgiving weekend, S-AB is likely to reach the 10,000 visit mark in a few days. If I can identify my 10,000th visitor (I'll post location of origin and whatever other identifying details I can get from my Sitemeter, so that you can reply by comment to my post or by e-mail), I'll send you as a prize a practically virgin CD, Rang Tang Ding Dong, by the Cellos. They were a five man doo-wop group of the 1950s who produced a small but interesting body of work. Originally called the Marcals until someone, probably Charles Merenstein of Apollo Records, advised them that being named for a popular brand of toilet paper wasn't a great career move, they had one charted hit, "Rang Tang Ding Dong (I'm the Japanese Sandman)", but this CD collection also includes such unheralded gems as "Juicy Crocodile", "The Be-Bop Mouse", the dreamy ballad "You Took My Love" and two versions of the jumping "What's the Matter For You?"

My Sitemeter now (Tuesday, November 20, 4:00 p.m. EST), stands at 9,854. Visit early and often.

"Values voting" in Australia?

According to this article in today's New York Sun, the Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, holds a solid lead in the polls over the Coalition led by incumbent Prime Minister Howard, with only a few days left until the election. This lead, the article says, can be traced back to a surge of Labor support following a visit to New York by Mr. Rudd, in which he and Col Allan, the Australian Murdoch protege who edits the New York Post, went out for a night of heavy drinking, culminating in a visit to Scores, where bouncers threatened to eject Mr. Rudd for touching the dancers and other "inappropriate behavior."

There's a great animated comment on this by Nicholson in The Australian, here.

Evidently, "values voting" Down Under can have different implications than it does here.

The Bothy Band

The Bothy Band was one of my favorite traditional Irish groups. Here's an example to show why:

The Bothy Band lasted barely four years (1975-79), but made much marvelous music in their time together. After they broke up, Donal Lunny (bouzouki) returned to Planxty, and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill (keyboards and vocals) and her brother, Micheal O'Domhnaill (guitar and vocals; spoken intro on the video above), emigrated to the U.S., where they have performed in several groups. Others in the group were: Paddy Keenan on uilleann pipes; Matt Molloy (later to join the Chieftains) on flute; and either Tommy Peoples or Kevin Burke, depending on when the video was made, on fiddle.

Update: More Bothy Band here.

On quantification, and keeping score (not a sports post).

The week before last, the New York City Board of Education released "A" through "F" letter grades for almost all (some were deferred for more evaluation) of the City's public schools. While something like 60% of schools received an "A" or "B", some of what are thought of as very successful or greatly improved schools received lower grades. I've already weighed in on this subject in Brooklyn Heights Blog (see comment thread under this post); however, I felt the need to say something more considered and philosophical about this issue.

Unsurprisingly, Louise Crawford beat me to the punch in OTBKB , with these astute words:

Report cards are reductive things. As [is] ... reliance on quantitative ways of assessing things. Numbers, numbers, numbers.

How high did you score? How much did you sell? How much do you make? How much? How much?

It's the American way.

But why is it the American way? Brighter people than me, like Alexis de Tocqueville, David Reisman and Philip Slater, have addressed this question. I'll recount three commonplace observations that, like most conventional wisdom, are useful if not complete explanations. Perhaps most familiar is the notion that Americans are obsessed with scorekeeping because we don't have a rigid class or caste system that simply assigns social status at birth (though anyone who thinks class is unimportant here should consult Paul Fussell). The fact that we can be both economically and socially mobile makes us keen to measure where we are with respect to our fellows.

The second notion is that Americans are attracted to quantification because we distrust subjectivity. To most Americans, subjectivity means favoritism, whether that be the favoritism in-groups employ to perpetuate their power, or the favoritism out-groups get by using the political process to obtain what in-groups see as unfair advantages. Somehow, reducing things to numbers, or to letter grades supposedly based on quantitative measurements, dispels these suspicions.

The third is that life is just too damned complicated for us to deal with all the complexity of evaluating the choices available to us in any meaningful way, so we look for shortcuts. "Experts" are happy to provide directions that will shorten our decision-making journey. Despite our inclination to distrust others' subjective judgment, we can trust these experts because they dress their conclusions in supposedly "objective", quantitative garb.

Paul Tibbets and consequentialism.

A while back, I was planning a post on the topic of consequentialism; essentially, the belief that the ethical measure of an action or inaction is its consequences, at least as reasonably foreseen by the actor. My take on this was that we are all consequentialists in the last analysis. Those who claim to be deontologists; that is, those who believe that the ethical nature of an action depends upon whether it is in accordance with a duty incumbent upon the actor, whether that duty is believed to be ordained by divine command or, as with Kant, arising from our status as free and rational beings, are really saying that we are too shortsighted to evaluate fully the consequences of actions, and that, therefore, we must yield our judgment to hard and fast rules. In other words, deontology could be said to be consequentialism with a strong gloss of epistemological modesty.

For example, while a consequentialist may argue that destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells is ethically OK because it provides the means to alleviate great human suffering, while causing no pain to the pre-conscious embryos (this is a utilitarian argument, utilitarianism being perhaps the best-known form of consequentialism), a deontologist might argue that such an action violates an overarching duty to respect human life from the moment of conception. If pressed to give a reason for such a rule, however, the deontologist might invoke a "slippery slope" argument, that is, if we allow this, we are taking the first step on a downhill path that may lead to the cloning of malformed embryos with minimal brain function, to be raised in vitro simply to grow organs to be harvested for transplant, and, beyond that, to the use of viable humans with substandard mental function for the same purpose. Or, she might give a more far-reaching, "Burkean" answer: by calling into question a time-honored notion of what's good and proper, we are disturbing a complex system of societal mores, and this may have consequences well beyond what we have anticipated. Note, however, that both of these arguments appeal to consequences, and therefore are consequentialist. (I now know that John Stuart Mill anticipated this argument in his preface to Utilitarianism almost a century and a half ago.)

What inspired me to write this was the death of Paul Tibbets, and, in particular, this piece by Bob Greene about him. What struck me was the sheer consequentialism that sustained him after that fateful day over Hiroshima. His bio shows him to be a consummate warrior. Warriors seem to be archetypal deontologists. (I need only recall my last year of college, when my roommate and I had a deal: every time I made him suffer through a Dylan album, he could make me sit through his recording of the greatest speeches of General Douglas MacArthur. I can still hear in my mind the peroration of his farewell address to the Corps of Cadets at West Point: "Duty, honor, country, and the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.") Yet Greene's piece quotes Tibbets as explaining why he never lost sleep over the bombing as being, not "It was my duty", but

because "we stopped the killing." He was at peace, he said, because "I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did."

Here, indeed, is Jeremy Bentham's felicitous calculus at its most stark. Dostoyevsky challenged this kind of reasoning by asking something to the effect: If a world of eternal happiness could be purchased by the suffering and death of one innocent child, would you buy the ticket?

Perhaps the thing about war is, it makes us all buy the ticket.

Paul Tibbets photo - U.S. Air Force, public domain.

11/18 update: Dawn Coyote posted this comment on WikiFray, where I cross-posted the text above:

I don't know if war makes us buy the ticket, or if it just makes us starkly aware that we've bought the ticket. In the increasingly connected world, it takes a determined averting of the gaze to remain unaware of how many of the surpluses we enjoy come to us as a result of deficits elsewhere. Maybe we're all Paul Tibbets these days—if we're lucky, or powerfully motivated to quell our cognitive dissonance.

I'll confess to feeling a bit sheepish about my last sentence. When I wrote it, it was past midnight, I'd had my second snifter of Cognac (a third would have been disastrous, as I've learned through hard experience), and I was just looking for a way to wrap the thing up. It was almost as bad as following the advice Michael O'Donoghue gave to aspiring novelists in "How to Write Good", which was published in National Lampoon sometime in the 1970s. If your plot gets too complicated and you can't figure out how to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, he wrote, simply type the words: "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck."

Anyway, I had great plans to extend the argument to include the contemporary debate over the use of torture. At least I can direct you to a lively discussion here, with thanks to friend and neighbor "ts" of Instaputz for the link.

While I'm giving thanks (we're getting into that week), a great big hat tip to John McG for my first-ever (at least that I know of) "digg." John, I'm trying to figure out the Episcopalian analogue to making a Novena.

All for now, as I am suddenly run over by a truck.

Fog.

Brooklyn Bridge from northern entrance to Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park.


Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn Bridge Park.


Lower Manhattan from northern end of Brooklyn Heights Promenade.


Maple tree behind house on Columbia Heights, as seen from Promenade.

Today, I'm proud to be a lawyer.

I don't blog much about law. It's not that I find my profession uninteresting (far from it); it's just that I need a forum to express my half-baked opinions on other subjects. Every once in a while, though, something makes me want to get up on a soapbox and yell, "I'm a lawyer and, by God, I'm proud of it!" I had that feeling last week when I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times showing a roomful of Pakistani lawyers who had gathered to organize a protest against the government's suspension of constitutional rights and protections and the summary sacking of the Supreme Court. Almost all were men, dressed more conservatively than most male New York lawyers, i.e. in dark suits, white shirts and conservative ties. Two were women, in dark skirts, white blouses and with aqua colored shawls draped from their heads. I later learned that these lawyers, along with many judges, had been summarily jailed with no recourse to any authority capable of, or willing to, enforce any notion of due process.

On Thursday I received an e-mail from Barry Kamins, President of the New York City Bar Association, notifying me and all other members that today, Tuesday the 13th, there would be a rally in front of the Supreme Court, New York County courthouse, to show solidarity with Pakistani lawyers. Today I took the subway to lower Manhattan, dressed, as Mr. Kamins urged, in my most conservative duds, to join the protest. Walking the corridor toward the subway exit, I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned, and was delighted to see two colleagues from the firm with which I have an affiliation, also headed to the rally. As we emerged from the station onto Foley Square, I was delighted to see a very large crowd on the courthouse steps (see photo above).


The highlight of the event was a brief talk by Ali Ahsan (see photo above), a Pakistan-born New York lawyer, whose father is president of the Pakistani Supreme Court Bar and has been imprisoned, and whose mother is subject to an arrest warrant. He said he was grateful that his parents' prominence would assure international attention to their cases, and expressed dismay that many others were not so fortunate. He said the turnout for the rally made him proud to be part of the New York legal community, and read an e-mail message from the University of Lahore Law School faculty and students expressing their gratitude for our support. Finally, he noted that the actions of the Pakistani government should not be countenanced as necessary to combat terrorism; indeed, they were more likely to foment it.

Blogitus interruptus.

It's been over a week since I've posted anything, and I can sense my vast fan base getting restless. For a few days, I was busy with other projects, including Brooklyn Heights Blog. Then my modem/router died. Verizon has promised me a new one in a few days; until then, I must either poach on the bandwidth of neighbors who haven't password-protected their wireless, or post from my office, which is where I am now on a Sunday evening.

Please be patient, folks. Good stuff is coming, including my philosophical musings prompted by the New York City Board of Education's attempt to "grade" public schools, and more paintings by Mark Crawford.

Until then, keep the faith.

Brooklyn Heights Halloween

All Saints' Eve is a very big deal in the Heights. People come from all over Brooklyn, even from other boroughs, to let their kids trick-or-treat here. Below are some scenes from last night's festivities.

Big kitty on Grace Court Alley.

Chef Martha hands out the goodies on Hicks Street.

A family offers bounty on Garden Place.

Skeleton on the stoop, Garden Place.

The firehouse provides candy and a chance to sit behind the wheel.

Not my long-promised Second Amendment post.

The HK-47 is the Hello Kitty version of the AK-47. For more details, go to Glamguns, where you can also shop for Lady Di handguns, Martha Stewart claymore mines, and more.

Thanks to Lauren Messiah, a blogger on AOL's StyleDash, for bringing this to my attention.

Hello, Daly City, CA.

You're my 1,000th visitor for the month of October. This is the first month that I've reached the 1K visits mark. Thanks.

Double your pleasure; double your fun!

The Red Sox have won. That doubles the number of their championships in the twenty-first century, and rates a double Li'l Macduff.

As an update to my last post, Twiff (Li'l Macduff's dad) rises to the bait I plunked in front of him and says the only good thing about pitchers batting is getting to see them run with their jackets on. I agree, it's amusing. But I've stated one aesthetic reason for hating the DH rule. I'll now advance another: symmetry. Every player should contribute to both offense and defense.

Li'l Macduff keeps smiling.

OK, daddy Twiff. Tell me you still think it's stupid for pitchers to bat. Dice-K proves that even AL hurlers can get that oh-so-important hit.

Ellsbury and Pedroia continue to amaze.

Please, don't anybody mention the 2004 ALCS as precedent for a comeback from an 0-3 deficit.

Farewell to BCS dreams.

USF Bulls out of it with two losses, today's to Connecticut. Probably out of the picture for Big East title. How could things go so bad so fast? Yeah, I know, Cinderella teams ...

Florida loses to ur-rival Georgia for the first time in some years. Urban Meyer may not yet be scanning Monster.com, but his tailor may get some business.

Just about everything else is depressing, especially Ohio State over the Nittany Lions.

Could I learn to love the Jayhawks?

Jeez, Louise,

... here we thought OTBKB was a family-friendly blog.

That being said, Risa Mickenberg, of this group, has to be the most delightfully salacious female vocalist since Sippie Wallace. Having listened to one of their songs (guess which), I may never be able to cross from the Hutch to the Merritt with a straight face again.

This baby's frown muscles may atrophy.

Sox take Game 2, this time a 2-1 squeaker. Probably good for their karma. Schilling, Okajima and Papelbon take care of business on the mound, while Lowell and Varitek provide the only needed RBIs. Off to mile-high land with a 2-0 lead.

Sox win Game One.

It's a 13-1 blowout. My wife will consider this a bad omen, given her oft-expressed belief that the Sox only do well when they start badly. To which I offer the counter-example of their having won game one of the ALCS, then lost the next three before rebounding. In any event, Twiff's and Seph's li'l MacDuff is happy.

Moon over Brooklyn Bridge

Some thoughts on order and normalcy.

Proof that college football teams are not elements of a well-ordered set:

October 6, 2007: LSU 28 - Florida 24
October 13, 2007: Kentucky 43 - LSU 37
October 20, 2007: Florida 45 - Kentucky 37

Pete Thamel, in the New York Times, has some interesting observations about "normalcy," which he sees as returning after a weekend in which only three top ten teams were upset (my beloved South Florida by Rutgers, Spurrier's South Carolina by lowly Vandy, and Kentucky by Florida, which would have been an easy favorite three weeks ago - see above). Perhaps the most dispiriting comment in his piece, for me, is this: "But nothing could signal a return to normalcy more than Ohio State and Michigan on a collision course to play for the Big Ten title." Spare us.

Thamel also reflects a bit on polls. I predicted South Florida would fall from the top ten after losing to Rutgers, despite other teams having kept top ten rankings after a single loss. Indeed, the Bulls fell to eleventh in the AP and twelfth in the USA Today poll; however, they are fifth in the aggregate of computer polls used by the BCS. Thamel points out that two of USF's victories (over Auburn and West Virginia) are more impressive than any of Southern Cal's, while the Bulls' loss on the road to Rutgers is less embarrassing than the Trojans' drubbing at home by Stanford. Nevertheless, USC is now ahead of USF in the "human" polls, while the reverse obtains in the computer rankings. That human voters are biased toward the familiar is Thamel's unsurprising conclusion.