When the songbird sings

Enjoy!

Circle search by Shahram Sharif

“The sensation that defines the search is the sweet, painful feeling that you get when you can’t think of a word that feels as if it’s right on the tip of your tongue. For most people, the relief they experience upon finding it is almost physical. They sink back in their chairs and try not to stumble upon any more difficult words. The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to say.”

–Michael Lewis, “The New New Thing”

Roger Federer won his fifth consecutive US Open Men’s Singles–and 13th Grand Slam–title by beating Andy Murray 6-2, 7-5, 6-2. Ironically, of all his matches in the last slam of the year, this one looked the easiest. Even the second set did not feel like a cliffhanger at all. He is back and order is restored in the universe, which also means I can now return to a saner sleeping pattern.

Update:

What in God’s name is that ball boy gesturing and who is he gesturing at? Bad, bad, baaad!

The old Roger Federer is obviously reappearing, and it looks like he’s now beating mono for good. Traces of mono virus can still linger in a patient’s organs and parts of the brain (according to the truthiness of Wikipedia), causing lethargy or mental fatigue even if tests show 100% recovery. That applied to The Fed in the earlier months, and now it’s fairly easy to believe that the funk he was in was not mental at all in the psychological sense. It was physiological.

I still don’t think that he’s playing with all gears yet, but this is so much better than all the game everyone had seen from him in the previous 8 weeks. Last night (or yesterday if you are in that part of the world), Roger defeated Novak Djokovic 6-3 5-7 7-5 6-2. He had a solid first set, lost a shaky 2nd, barely scraped through the 3rd, and then closed the deal in the 4th. Towards the end of the fourth set, it was as if Djokovic had given up as The Fed racked point after point with the powerful forehand. Flashes of Fed’s brilliance resulted in one of the highlights of the match, which was the overhead lob that only a guy like him could produce.

This match looked easier than the 4th round five-setter with Igor Andreev. And perhaps part of the win/loss factor was the NY crowd’s support for the current world no. 2. Djokovic was booed during the post-match interview by the Arthur Ashe stadium crowd when he made references to Andy Roddick’s jokes about his frequent calls for trainers.

Most fans are hoping for a Murray-Federer championships, and commentators agree. But it’s TMF himself who thinks otherwise. If his wish is granted, I’d better stock up on antacid and avoid coffee before the match.

“Who do I prefer to play? I prefer the trophy, that’s what I prefer,” said Roger, who was deposed as world number one last month. “But I guess I would have to say Rafa because we’ve had such great battles over the year. Wimbledon was unbelievable so I hope we can have another one.”

Murray was giving current no. 1 a hard time yesterday until the weather refused to cooperate, so Roger might get his wish. My happiness does not depend on Federer winning this year’s US Open title, but I’m crossing my fingers for him, just the same.

Sigh. This is one of those times when I wish I were still in New York. Lisa, please?

UPDATE:

So it’s with Andy Murray, then. Live telecast of the championship match starts at 5AM on Balls.

“We consume books, movies, music, and visual art primarily to fulfill the internal emotional needs that are fundamental to our personalities. But we also make choices about art based on a desire to carve out identities for ourselves—to articulate the stories of our lives. By the same token, we look for those stories in others. We also feel intuitively that we can judge others by their tastes. …

“People high in neuroticism—less emotionally stable people who are anxious, sensitive, and easily upset—tend to be artistically creative and gravitate toward emotionally turbulent art, including films, songs, and literature often seen as romantic, according to Burt’s research. They decorate their living spaces with inspirational posters bearing messages like, “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference,” or, “Until you spread your wings, you’ll never know how far you can fly.” These self-affirmations help neurotic people manage their tendency to worry and become blue, explains Gosling. “The posters are a visual form of self-medication.”

–Accounting for Taste on Psychology Today.

Photo: Truth Hurts.

…at least for the time being. With the way things turned out in the previous tourneys this year, it’s better to set expectations at a more realistic level. However, today’s match still blew Fed fans away with awesome display of athleticism and genius, enough to make us hope that the old Roger is back. And we want him back.

“Roger won his 30th consecutive US Open match today, defeating Radek Stepanek 6-3, 6-3, 6-2 to reach the fourth round of the year’s last Grand Slam event.

“To win his first Grand Slam of the season, Roger is aiming for his fifth straight title at Flushing Meadows. He has not lost a set in three matches, and raised his right fist after zinging a final, winning forehand down the line. “I guess it’s just nice to play well. Pretty simple,” our champ said. “No complaints.”

More at RF.com. Screw CBS (via Balls) for depriving us of the third set and saving just the last few seconds leading to matchpoint for delayed telecast. With the American network giving its airtime to the Muller-Almagro match (qualifier Muller won 7-6, 6-3, 6-7, 6-7, 5-7), it was a double-bummer when live scores on the official site went on a fritz. Couldn’t handle traffic, perhaps? That surely looked like a scaling issue.

I don’t know if he reads or listens to what his fans say about his outfit, but he didn’t wear the “UPS uniform” anymore after his 1st round match.

Tennis, with all its drama, is great company when you’re pulling in an all-nighter, no matter how ulcer-inducing it gets sometimes.

The way athletes express victory–chests puffed out, arms in the air, head tilted back–may have been a result of evolutionary programming, according to research from University of British Columbia and San Francisco State University. Comparisons of photographs of sighted athletes, the congenitally blind, and those who lost their sights later in life show similarities in reactions to winning. This is especially notable among people who have been blind all their lives who express body gestures of winning similar to their sighted counterparts. The study also suggests that similarities in expressions of winning cuts across cultures, and might have been a product of social communication of early humans. By appearing to be larger than the rest, the alpha humans give the impression of dominance and power.

I wonder if Nadal’s grunts have anything to do with his new ranking. Read the article on Live Science.

Top-performing executives and athletes have a lot of things in common, according to Richard F. Gerson’s The Executive Athlete: How Sports Psychology Helps Business People Become World-Class Performers:

• They prepare themselves for the upcoming event and make sure they are ready to perform.
• They plan their activities so that they know what they will do, when they will do it, and what will be expected of them.
• They have a purpose for what they are doing in business, sports, and life.
• They show a passion for what they do. They love what they do so much that they would probably do it for free if they could afford to; and even do it forever if physically and mentally capable of doing so.
• They are persistent and committed to achieving success.
• They are patient as performers because they know that success and high achievement do not always come quickly or easily.
• They practice diligently, consistently, and continuously, with specific objectives in mind.
• They perform “as if” when they are not quite ready to be the best they can be.
• They use personal mastery to help them develop confidence, increase self-esteem, and overcome fear.
• They are proactive performers, rather than passive observers or reactive actors. They more often than not take the lead to get the job done, and they do it well.

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life…

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, ‘casualties may rise to a million.’ With individual stories, the statistics become people–but even that is a lie, for people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears?…

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

And life that is, like any others, unlike any other.”

–Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Photo: From no man is an island by murplej@ne

From Executive Brief:

“…thousands of white-collar jobs are being shipped to developing economies as companies search for ways to lower operating costs. These white-collar jobs include customer service, R&D, documentation, and not to be missed, software development. Various emerging markets have since been competing against each other in the race to sell (the capabilities of) their armies of engineers, scientists, and accountants–to name a few–to companies based in the North America, Western Europe, and developed Asian economies.

“Because of the increasing number of jobs being off-shored, even those who first supported off-shoring wavered in their conviction about the advantages of shipping back-office operations abroad. Furthermore, there is much talk about workers’ rights, economic damage, and low-quality of work because of outsourcing. “

Is outsourcing purely evil? Is India the only available outsourcing destination? Is China the only other outsourcing destination? Continue reading here.

Image from inju.