An autumn day

Literally. That's what we had. An Autumn day. On Wednesday, all the leaves were on the trees and seemingly mostly green, on Thursday it was beautiful and colorful, and on Friday the wind blew everything down and now there are no leaves on any of the trees on my block.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.

Special Black Friday Preview

I couldn't find my reading glasses when I was eating lunch, so instead of reading I went through the circulars that came with today's paper to survey the early bird sale times. Here are my results:

9:00 1
8:00 1
7:00 5
6:00 1
5:30 2
5:00 10 (Best Buy starts giving out numbers at 3 AM)
4:30 1 (Some place called Ink Stop)
4:00 2
No time specified or normal hours: 10

My daughter and I decided that 4AM, the opening time for Kohls and JC Penney, was simply to early to be early. 4AM is still night it's not morning.

Thanksgiving

I went for a walk this morning, which was nice. I'm thankful that I get to work with people (adults and kids) that I'm fond of, but I'm not someone who really craves company. In fact, by nature I'm pretty content to be alone. One of my weaknesses in business is that I don't like being bothered, and so by logical extension I don't like bothering anybody else. Well, part of an account manager's job is to bother people and make sure they're doing your work, (I'll expand on how ad agencies operate at another time) and I just wasn't very good at that part. Anyway, it was nice to take a nice walk alone.

We seldom do a traditional Thanksgiving dinner here. We go to grandma's house one night, the night this year being Friday. Last year on the Thursday we went out to eat, but since I'm the only one in my family who actually likes turkey, it wasn't very successful I didn't want to do some kind of miniThanksgiving, so I decided we're having a Thanksgiving brunch.

Interesting to go in a supermarket on Thanksgiving. It's not your usual crowd. There's a lot of action in the baking aisle, which is usually pretty unpopulated, and there are a lot of men who seem to be husbands sent out to get a missing ingredient or two. I was buying a bunch of things for the brunch, but I was also looking for whole blanched almonds (the kind with no skin). Nuts are confusing to find in the supermarket. There's always an aisle that says "nuts," but only a small fraction of the nut varieties live there. There's a pretty good selection in the baking aisle, but most of the action is in and around the produce. I counted at least 20 different types of almonds in this supermarket, including skinless slivered, sliced and dry roasted and salted, but no whole, plain blanched almonds. Sigh. Off to Whole Foods, to fight off the hordes of vegans swarming around the Tofurkey case.

Names

The New York Times has a list where you can search for your last name from among the top 500 surnames in America. The big news is the growth of Hispanic names. Although I saw some names that I've known Jewish people to have, the highest ranking name that I think "sounds" Jewish is Jacobs, which is #233. Zimmerman and Klein are in the mid-330's. I didn't look for any more.

Here's the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17surnames.html

Righting a wrong

I am aware that one of the noticeable omissions on this blog is the lack of discussion of produce. I think we all tend to take produce for granted, unless we design supermarkets, which are nearly all consciously designed to (1) make you enter in the produce section because it's pretty and makes for good impulse shopping, and (2) make you walk through as much of the store as possible to get to the milk.

Anyway, I just wanted to remark that Honeycrisp apples, purchased in the produce department, are the best food ever. I've never had anything edible in the house that disappears as quickly. As a family we eat between 25 and 30 of them a week.

Friday

I went to New York Friday. My parents sponsor a concert by this amazing organization called Young Concert Artists. Conservatory students audition to be in YCA, which helps them get bookings and teaches them how to live as a professional musician. Impressive stuff, and an impressive list of alumni as well, including Emanuel Ax and Pinchas Zuckerman. Today it was a Russian cellist. He was great and the accompanist was maybe the best I've ever seen. Turns out she won a prestigious award as a "collaborative musician." I didn't know there was such a designation. Fascinating.

After the concert, we had an hour before our train, and the daughter wanted to go to the big Macy's and get sprayed with lots of kinds of perfumes. I decided not to partake and went to the Starbucks on the balcony. It reminded me of a favorite holiday ritual of mine, where I'd go to down to Herald Square on Christmas Eve, park myself in the Macy's balcony, and watch the goyim scramble for their last minute presents. Now I could do that and have a latte at the same time. And who says progress isn't good?

In Macy's we stumbled onto the ball that drops from the top of One Times Square this New Year's Eve. I tried to insert a picture but Blogger is malfunctioning, so you'll have to take my word for it. It was big and bright and pretty and it changes colors every few seconds. I want one.

Car Conversation

M: "My vocabulary sucks, but I guess I can just study words for the SAT"
F: "I think the flash cards will ameliorate the problem."
M: "What's ameliorate?"
F: "An SAT word"
M: "Daaad!"
S: "At least it's not like my dad. He uses these big words and then asks me what the Greek and Latin roots of them are."
F: "Cool, now I can do that too and you can't say 'none of my friends' parents make them do that.' "
M: "Daaad!"

Boomer Generation

I'm sure there have been other generations that have felt this way, but I can't help thinking about the explosion of consumer goods in my lifetime. I was thinking about this because I just spent $2.29 to buy a package of gum. My daughter says this is her favorite gum and I'm thinking, sure it is, 'cause I'm paying for it. I then remarked that $2.29 for gum was the stupidest thing I've ever seen. So I was thinking about candy and the like, and I remember when Sweetarts appeared. They were the first "intense" candy, though they seem pretty tame now.

So it got me thinking about other stuff that's arrived within the bounds of my memory. In music playback, for instance, I've seen the introduction of the cassette tape (I had a portable reel-to-reel deck when I was a kid- fun, but messy if you dropped the tape), the portable cassette player, the compact disk and its portable player, and now MP3 and the related digital technologies. I got my first computer in 1986 and I was the first person I knew who had one (same for the pocket calculator in 1972).

Writers' Strike

Seems like sort of an ironic title, don't you think? We had an interesting discussion in class yesterday about the Hollywood writers strike and the Broadway stagehands strike as well. I'm firmly on the side of the union here, at least in the writers strike. It seems like there's plenty of money to go around here, but residual payments are what level the income streams of people in a fickle business, and I'm not inclined to believe anything the studio heads say.

My feeling about unions were shaped by my cable TV years, when I was on the negotiating team for several contracts. Some of them were easy, some were nasty (sabotaging equipment and that kind of stuff, no violence). But my strongest memory was the negotiation in Portsmouth, Ohio. I was working with a regional manager named Walter, who lives in Johnstown, Pennsylvania by choice. Portsmouth is a small city, about 20,000 people, on the Ohio River, not too far from the appropriately named Ashland, Kentucky.

To get to Portsmouth you fly into Huntington, West Virginia, about 50 miles down the river. Huntington is in coal mining country and is very, very hilly. Since there's no flat ground, they chopped the top off one of the larger hills and created an area large enough to land jets. It was always a little frightening flying in there, because the hill ended right after the runway did, kind of like landing on an aircraft carrier, except with wooded hillsides instead of water. Portsmouth itself is known (not when I was there) for having one of the worst pigeon problems in the country. There were so many pigeons in the downtown area that the mayor had speakers installed over which they blasted the noises that hawks and eagles make when they're swooping down to nab a tasty squab for dinner. I never found out if that worked or not.

During the negotiation, I got to see the union rep ask good old Walter if we could improve our wage offer to the lowest paid workers by 10 cents an hour, I think it was from $5.50 to $5.60. Walter would look down at his papers, then look the guy in the eye and say, no, we can't afford it. And here I am thinking, these guys work to keep the business running and they live in this crappy town and we can't budge a lousy 10 cents an hour for the dozen lowest paid employees? I knew then that I wasn't cut out to be a management negotiator. So I'm an MBA who doesn't trust big business. What can I say?

Trying to do this more regularly

I'm aware that it's not really important that I blog every day, but if I don't it goes against my self image as someone who has at least one interesting thought every day.

I just bought a few graphic novels. I read V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore, which was horrifying and wonderful, so I got another one of Moore's books, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Steve Cloves' Ghost World, which was made into a pretty good movie that happened to be Scarlett Johansson's debut. I liked the movie and I heard the book was better. Since I was at least a medium level comic book fan as a kid, the transition to this for is pretty easy.

Parent conferences coming up. They're a lot of work, but usually very useful for all involved, and I like getting to know parents. It's also end of the marking period, which is generally pretty stressful for everyone.

Speaking of which, I've got some papers to mark. I'll try to be back soon.

Bike Riding

I hadn't been out on my bike for a couple of weeks, but I used my recovered hour this morning to go out for a ride. The first few pedals felt terrific; the power of my legs going to the wheels and propelling me forward. That was great, but I realized as I continued that there was more to my enjoyment than that.

The great thing about bike riding is that it's full of sensation. The feeling of the fast air on my skin, the smell of an autumn morning, the sounds of everything from birds and squirrels to cars and lawnmowers, and sights of the length and contour of the road and everything it passes through make it a rich experience. I realized as I rode along, that all the comforts of home mean the absence of those senses. Don't get me wrong, I think that homes have many good points, facilitating survival being perhaps the handiest. But if you're in a properly heated, quiet, relatively odorless place, it maybe dulls your senses just a bit (thank goodness I don't have to work in such a place). You don't really notice it until you get a jolt like I did this morning. I also noticed that somebody's running for Sheriff of Narberth. Does he get to wear a silver star?

The one thing that always bothered me about living and working in the suburbs is that it's possible to get through your entire day almost completely isolated from your environment. This is why I couldn't wait to move out of LA, which was much worse because everything there is designed not only so that you don't have to step out into anything, but so that you can avoid all but the most necessary human contact as well. Where I live, at least I can and do walk to the supermarket or the drug store, or ride a bike to almost anything important. But you have to make the effort. There's nothing about suburban life that naturally tends toward that. When I lived in Manhattan, I walked 2 miles to and from work, and it was never boring. Even when I lived on Old City I could walk to my office in Liberty Place and that wasn't boring either.

Whenever we travel, I always like to get out and find the supermarket and the post office and all the regular life stuff. It helps me feel that I am where I am, and not just floating through. It puts everything in context. I find that comforting.

Life

I don't know if this is instructive in any way, and there certainly isn't any reason why it has to be, but here's an incomplete list of some stuff I did by the time I was 25, just as a way of demonstrating that you can do an awful lot without actually "accomplishing" anything.

• Lived for 2 years in Zimbabwe (my parents' doing, not mine, and I remember nothing of it, though I have an interesting scar as a souvenir)
• Two years as fraternity president, the most interesting moment being when one of the house members came out of the closet, and the ensuing debate as to whether he should continue to live in the house
• Saw the final game of 2 World Series, the Mets 1969 win and the Yankees 1978 Reggie Jackson 3HR game (I slept outside Yankee Stadium for those tickets, so it was particularly sweet) and 2 NBA finals, including the famous Willis Reed game
• Had an Orthodox Bar Mitzvah in a Boro Park shul made up almost entirely of WW I veterans, average age about 70
• Drove across the US 5 times, passing through all 48 states. Had a head-on collision near Mt. Ranier in Washington. Drove the car all the way back with a steering column that was so bent that if you turned the wheel all the way left it would just stay there and you'd drive in circles.
  
• Ran a floating craps game in high school made up of all the honors math kids. I guess we were hooked on probability. After we got caught I taught them all to play bridge.
• Won my college bridge championship twice and played in a national tournament at U Penn (my phirst time in Philly)
  
• Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge about 50 times (something everyone ought to do), including once in a peace march
• Worked as a copy boy in a newsroom the day Richard Nixon became president
• MC'd a weekly trivia show, and had my own college radio show from 2AM to 4AM.
• Ran over my own dog (maybe the worst thing ever). Wasn't my fault, she ran under the rear wheel after I'd driven by
• Won a bicycle on a TV show. This is actually a good story. My whole Cub Scout pack went to a TV kids game show. The minimum age was 10, but a bunch of us (myself included) were only 9. When we asked the Scout Leader what to do, he told us to LIE and say we were 10. Don't think that's part of the scout pledge. Anyway, I won the biggest prize on the show. The bike got stolen from me at knife point 2 years later.

Off to a Bat Mitzvah. More to come...

End of the week venting

First of all, how about that Verizon Wireless? When does Daylight Savings time end guys? From wha I read in the news, what Verizon is best at at the moment is eavesdropping on their customers without a warrant, but that's another story.

All I have to say specifically about today is that it's part of the basic functionality of a school to have classes flow one into the next smoothly. Bells? Don't really need them. What you need is an agreed on way to mark the end of one period and the beginning of the next. If bells are they way you do that, fine, but then make sure it happens. No bells? Fine, clocks work too.

Regarding my recent post about postage, I heard that about 20 college recommendations got returned for insufficient postage, so I guess I wasn't the only one (I guess this is my post-postage post). I don't envy the kids and how much work it is doing the applications. I applied to 19 colleges, which was unheard of and probably still is (it wasn't nearly as expensive back then, even in constant dollars), and it was just a ridiculous amount of work, especially since there were no word processors or printers or common applications or anything. My Mom and I typed everything. Of course, I ended up hating the college I picked, but that was a well-intentioned mistake and I don't fault myself for making it, though I wish in retrospect that I'd transferred once I knew I hated it. But then, of course, I wouldn't have ended up here. Unless I did. It's like Yogi Berra says, if you come to a fork in the road, take it.