Modified Bullet Quotes

Every few months or so at home, Pops had to have Taiwanese ’Mian. Not the Dan-Dan Mian you get at Szechuan restaurants or in Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, but Taiwanese Dan-Dan. The trademark of ours is the use of clear pork bone stock, sesame paste, and crushed peanuts on top. You can add chili oil if you want, but I take it clean because when done right, you taste the essence of pork and the bitterness of sesame paste; the texture is somewhere between soup and ragout. Creamy, smooth, and still soupy. A little za cai (pickled radish) on top, chopped scallions, and you’re done. I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship. Did this old man invent Dan-Dan Mian? No. But did he perfect it with techniques and standards never before seen? Absolutely. He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what that Dan-Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question.

I’m trying to modify my NYPD piggishness. I have not hit on one single—or married—female in the ATTF. I was actually getting a reputation as a man who was either devoted to duty, or was devoted to some off-scene girlfriend, or was gay, or who had a low libido, or who perhaps had been hit below the belt by one of those bullets. In any case, a whole new world was opening up to me now. Women in the office talked to me about their boyfriends and husbands, asked me if I liked their new hairstyles, and generally treated me in a gender-neutral manner. The girls haven’t yet asked me to go shopping with them or shared recipes with me, but maybe I’ll be invited to a baby shower. The old John Corey is dead, buried under a ton of politically correct memos from Washington. John Corey, NYPD Homicide, is history. Special Contract Agent John Corey, ATTF, has emerged. I feel clean, baptized in Potomac holy water, reborn and accepted into the ranks of the pure angelic hosts with whom I work.

As with the “You can prove anything with statistics” claim, I usually find that the people making these other irrational claims don’t even quite mean what they say, and their own choices will betray their stated beliefs. If you ask someone to enter a betting pool to guess the outcome of the number of heads in 12 coin tosses, even the person who claims odds can’t be assigned will prefer the numbers around or near six heads. The person who claims to accept no risk at all will still fly to Moscow using Aeroflot (an airline with a safety record worse than any U.S. carrier) to pick up a $1 million prize. In response to the skeptics of statistical models he met in his own profession, Paul Meehl proposed a variation on the game of Russian roulette.15 In his modified version there are two revolvers: one with one bullet and five empty chambers and one with five bullets and one empty chamber. Meehl then asks us to imagine that he is a “sadistic decision-theorist” running experiments in a detention camp. Meehl asks, “Which revolver would you choose under these circumstances? Whatever may be the detailed, rigorous, logical reconstruction of your reasoning processes, can you honestly say that you would let me pick the gun or that you would flip a coin to decide between them? Meehl summarized the responses: “I have asked quite a few persons this question, and I have not yet encountered anybody who alleged that he would just as soon play his single game of Russian roulette with the five-shell weapon.” Clearly, those who answered Meehl’s question didn’t really think probabilities were meaningless. As we shall see before the end of this chapter, Meehl’s hypothetical game is less “hypothetical” than you might think.