Thank you thank you thank you Ben Miller at the “Internet Food Association”:http://internetfoodassociation.wordpress.com for writing a “post”:http://internetfoodassociation.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/bring-me-a-beefsteak/ about the _awesome_ local tradition of “beefsteaks” that mentions this marvelous _New York Times_ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/dining/30beef.html by Paul Lukas from nearly a year ago, which cites “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks,” by Joseph Mitchell, which appeared in _The New Yorker_ in 1939. If you have a “subscription”:http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1939-04-15#folio=040 or access to _The Complete New Yorker,_ I highly recommend that you go check it out. It just oozes awesomeness.
The heyday of the beefsteak tradition stretched from about the Civil War until Prohibition. The idea was that men (and only men) would gather in a saloon or a hall and consume meat (specifically, slices of grilled steak) and beer until the act of ingestion was no longer conceivable. They would sit on crates, with sawdust on the floor, and silverware was prohibited.
I think that covers the essentials. Needless to say, Mitchell was able to paint quite a picture on that subject. (I’d love to see Trillin or McPhee try to improve on it.)
I’ll end this with three awesome quotations from the article; the first two are spoken by people who appear in the story:

“The foundation of a good beefsteak is an overflowing amount of meat and beer.”
“When you go to a beefsteak, you got to figure on eating until it comes out of your ears. Otherwise it would be bad manners.”
“Women do not esteem a glutton.”

And there’s a lot more where that came from.
The best part? The tradition “still survives,”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/dining/30beef.html in New Jersey.
_Update:_ The article is also available in Mitchell’s renowned collection _Up in the Old Hotel._
_Second Update:_ Not surprisingly, Emily was “on this whole thing”:http://emdashes.com/2008/01/people-like-winners.php when the Lukas article first appeared last year.

If you’ve been reading Emdashes the last few weeks, then you’re probably “aware”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/gladwell-weathers-gauntlet-of.php that the “centerpiece”:http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt1.html of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is the “10,000-Hour Rule,” which is Gladwell’s way of highlighting the importance of dedicated practice, or more properly the capacity for dedicated practice, in permitting a person to become one of the dominant figures in a chosen field. Gladwell has stated that ten thousand hours is about the equivalent of ten years of dedicated practice.
My favorite standup comedian is “Patton Oswalt,”:http://www.pattonoswalt.com/ and I’ve had this “mp3 file”:http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/697440 kicking around my hard drive for a couple years now. It’s a “Hammer conversation” between Oswalt and Jeff Garlin, who plays Larry David’s manager on _Curb Your Enthusiasm._ It was held in Los Angeles at the Redcat Theater and hosted by KCET (I know nothing about Los Angeles, so I don’t know anything about that venue or KCET or much else). The date is listed as August 2006.
I played it recently and—lo and behold!—they start talking about the need for ten years of practice in order to become really good at something. That part is around the 50-minute mark. Here’s a rough transcript of that part:
Patton Oswalt: This is what’s always painful, when I go to like, Montreal, and they have like a sitcom actor or a film actor who they have host stuff, and they’re thinking, “I’ve succeeded as an actor, how hard can it be to be a standup, these guys are clowns.” and they go up and they suck so bad, it’s so painful, and then they look at you, if you get any kind of laughter, they look at you like, “Did you pay the audience off? … What the hell is going on?”
Jeff Garlin: A lot of the young comedians, they want to be famous like that. [snaps fingers] But to me it was never about being famous, it was about being good. If I’m good, everything else will take care of itself, hopefully.
Oswalt: All the great comedians, too, if they go up, and no-one knows who they are, in five minutes they can win a crowd of strangers over, that’s the power of a good standup, is, you go up and they don’t know who you are, and when you’re done they’re like, “Wow, that was funny,” rather than [infantile voice] “That’s the guy from the movie! With the thing on his head!”
Garlin: But most young comedians, when I tell them that it takes a minimum of ten years before you’re decent, they don’t want to hear that.
Oswalt: Because they don’t want to be “decent.”
Garlin: Because they’ve been doing it two years, and they’re sort of like, “No, I want to have a show!” and it’s all about everything but being good, being a good comedian… I always even jump into, like, a violinist, telling a young violinist, “Well you’re twelve years old, you’ve been playing for a couple years, it’s going to take you about ten, twelve years before you get decent.” They’re probably going to be disappointed, but that sounds realistic, doesn’t it?
Oswalt: Right, exactly.
Garlin: And I’m sorry, but doing standup the right way is as hard as playing the violin, if not harder, because you can play the violin to silence, and nobody knows if you suck…except on the inside.
Oswalt: And at the same time, you can do standup for twenty years the wrong way, and just … I remember all these guys, these headliners that I worked with, and they would go, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, so by default I’m great,” and then you go, “Well, you’ve actually, you’ve done it a year, and you’ve repeated that year nineteen times,” and that’s the twenty years you have under your belt.
Here’s another thing: I remember after Rob Corddry became a regular on _The Daily Show,_ I read an interview with him in which he said something like, “They say that as a young out-of-work actor, you have to keep at it for ten years, before it starts paying off, and I got the gig on _The Daily Show_ after I’d been at it for ten years.” Does anyone remember this? I thought it was in the A/V Club section of _The Onion,_ but I checked “that one”:http://www.avclub.com/content/node/47243 and it wasn’t in there. Is this a showbiz saying, “ten years before you start getting traction”? Anyone know?
By the way, I don’t regard any of this as “catching Gladwell out”; if anything, it’s corroboration.
The rest of that mp3 file is very good too; you’ll hear about the most disastrous Hollywood pitch meeting ever and the time that Patton Oswalt started a modest riot in Pittsburgh in 2003, for criticizing George W. Bush at the start of a war. It’s really funny to hear them talk about how amazing the movie _Borat_ is but not be able to mention any of the details about it because it’s a few months away from coming out.

Martin Schneider writes:
Ben Bernanke’s had a hard “time”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/an-obit-fit-to-blog-and-print.php of it “today”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/best-of-the-120108-issue-banan.php on our “site”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/the-wavy-rule-a-daily-comic-by-96.php, but you know, the Dow’s lost a fifth of its value since he took over the Fed. I think he can take what Emdashes dishes out.
For me, the most stunning revelation of John Cassidy’s “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/01/081201fa_fact_cassidy?printable=true comes in the third paragraph, in which it is revealed that before the truly cataclysmic problems began in September, Bernanke and his crew had been merrily pursuing what they “referred to as the ‘finger-in-the-dike’ strategy.”
The mind reels. Now, Bernanke has been criticized for seeing too little danger on the horizon, and judging from Cassidy’s fine article, that criticism is merited. But shouldn’t _his own choice of metaphor_ have been a powerful signal _to him_ that he might be assessing the potential for crisis too lightly?
Even if the actual folk tale of the Little Dutch Boy has a “happy ending”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker_or_the_Silver_Skates#Popular_culture:_the_legend_of_the_boy_and_the_dike, isn’t the image that the phrase evokes one of a crisis that mounts steadily, beyond the ability of even an infinite number of fingers to plug the bewildering profusion of holes? Isn’t the lesson that some problems demand _much more_ than a Little Dutch Boy?
That blind spot tells us much about the perils of ideological rigidity in an ideological time; if you believe that the market is self-correcting and that governmental intervention is pernicious, then you are liable to see even Armageddon Itself as a matter best handled by a few judicious tweaks to the interest rate. Bernanke’s not an ideological firebrand; yet even he believed these things. That’s telling.
Simply put: If Plan A is an overt advertisement that you intend to let the problem overwhelm your intentionally meager efforts, isn’t that a strong indication that you should start looking pretty carefully at Plan B?
It makes me think of John McCain. He never referred to the Sarah Palin pick, or anything else, as a “Hail Mary,” you know. That was a characterization made by observers. If he had done so, it would have been tantamount to conceding defeat; isn’t that exactly what Bernanke did? How is this not economic malpractice? Am I making too much of this?