Rock On

We just got Rock Band to complement our Guitar Hero set-up. So now we have two fake guitars in the house, on top of the 4 real guitars that rarely get touched.

I like these games, but I can't help wondering if it's the equivalent of the "organized" activities epidemic that have taken all the fun out of kids just playing for the sake of playing. Could Rock Band possible be as much fun a playing air guitar (or in my case when I was a teenager, playing the dog, who very much enjoyed the strange kind of scratching I was giving her) or banging on your leg or table or, again in my case, the steering wheel. Maybe, but as soon as you start scoring and having to do things in a particular way to succeed it seems less carefree.

OK, my STOP BEING AN OLD CRANK alarm has gone off again, so I'll just wish everyone a happy (and maybe just a bit more carefree) new year. I'll be back tomorrow with resolutions and some sort of unsolicited advice.

Never Thought About it Before

I got a holiday card today from a guy who used to work for me. Good employee, good guy. While we were working together his marriage broke up and he ultimately came out of the closet. At the time I was completely focused on holding the office (which was pretty small and close) together while all this was going on. They guy was a mess and made things very difficult for everyone who had to work with him, which was pretty much the whole office since he was in a key position. I spent hours with him in his office trying to talk him through and into a functional state because he really could have pulled the whole operation down.

After a lot of time and effort (of which mine was only a small part) he came out of it, happier and more productive than ever. And he's still doing great. It's something I look back on with some satisfaction as a manager and as a person.

I suddenly flashed on a time in college when I was president of my fraternity and one of the house members suddenly decided to come out. That almost tore the place apart. People had real trepidation about sharing a room, or even a house, with a homosexual. I was very much in favor of keeping him in the frat. He'd been living there for a year and a half and was well-liked (if a bit weird). It took several weeks, and for some reason we never consulted with any of the powers that be at the school, but we ultimately reached an uneasy consensus that the guy could stay, which he did without incident. I was not re-elected president.

Not sure if there's any point to this. Just an odd confluence of events separated by over 20 years. But you've got to accept people as they are, you know? Because it's not your place to change them, and having been a square peg in a round hole for much of my life, I can tell you without a doubt that trying to force your own structure on somebody else just doesn't work very well.

Seriously?

One of the things that I think challenges my students is that I seem very serious one moment and I'm joking around the next, and they don't know what sort of behavior is expected. I actually think that my approach is completely consistent.

A number of years ago, a guy named Russell Baker had a column in the New York Times. Baker was a humorist, an observer, not extremely political but tuned in nonetheless. He was a big favorite of mine. One of my favorite columns of his was about what it meant to be serious. His point was that little kids are inherently serious. They say what they mean and mean what they say, and they take in the world without nuance. Some things are funny, some are not. Some are good and some are bad. It's uncomplicated. In other words, they take things seriously.

Baker suggests that when people go through adolescence, everything gets topsy-turvy and people feel very off-balance, and so they try to recapture the directness and seriousness that they once had but they fail. Instead of serious, they become solemn. These are two different things. You can be serious and still have fun, but there's no place for fun in being solemn. When you hear someone described as being no fun, you're calling them solemn.

I have a tendency to initially take everything seriously and at face value, but I see humor in all sorts of serious matters, and given that people sometimes laugh at my jokes, I'm guessing that others recognize it as well. The flip side of this is that I often take things seriously and laugh at them at the same time. I don't really think there's enough of that in the world. I take teaching math seriously, and I expect my students to take learning it seriously as well. But that doesn't mean it can't be fun.

Ice Follies

I'm not sure what's up with the infatuation these Canadians have with ice. They've chosen to play their national sport on a surface that most people would rather walk around than on. But why would a nice, upscale resort on a fairly steep hillside want to leave the main pedestrian street covered with a sheet of ice? I get the environmental point of not spreading salt, but doesn't it behoove the owners to provide a surface that does not require one falling multiple times on the way to get a cup of coffee? I'm not exaggerating. I think they take the ski-in, ski-out thing too much to heart. They're so obsessed with allowing you to ski down from the slope directly to your room (not that you could stop yourself as you whizzed past your room) that they need to keep things slippery.

Then there's the roads. We rode most of the way back to Montreal on the main Autoroute (like an interstate) and for most of the way the left lane was partially ice covered. Haven't they heard of snow plows? Oh, yes they have. But they're tied up plowing the shoulders, which are completely iceless.

Oh, Canada?

Much as I like Canada, and Canadians for that matter, I keep wondering why they're here. I mean, why would the explorers go so far north when it gets so cold during the winter? Was fur that valuable? Did they all do their exploring in August and it was too hot in, say, Bar Harbor?

Some of the explorers were insane, of course. Henry Hudson was the poster boy for the crazy driven types, and his crew mutinied and let him off in the middle of the Atlantic in a small boat and he was never seen again. But there were lots of people up here. People settled in Canada. So it's not just the explorers, it's the ones who stayed who are the crazy ones.

The Review

We've spent the last 4 days in Mont-Tremblant, a ski resort about 2 hours north of Montreal. We picked it because we only had 5 days because my daughter has 7 !#$%ing basketball games during break so we couldn't travel far. Tremblant was relatively close to home and has a great reputation for and eastern ski area and as a resort town.

The best decision I made in planning this trip is the place we're staying. Many of the hotels and condos here are considered "ski-in, ski out," but I'd been told by a friend that he's stayed in such a place and had to walk up a bunch of icy stairs to get to the lift. I can dutifully report that there are a great number of icy steps here, and people do ski down to their rooms through town. The place we're staying is kind of like a hotel, but there's no restaurant or little shop in the lobby or even a newspaper stand. What it does have is a section with 2 and 3 bedroom condos and a back entrance about 100 feet from the lifts. I've never stayed right on the slope before and it's great to be able to go out the door at 3:00 when then lifts close at 3:30 and get 2 runs in. The ski school and rental shop are even closer.

The skiing is good. The conditions the first day were as good as anything I've ever had in the east, but it rained pretty heavily the first night and after that it was never any better than fair. I actually fell several times today, more than I'd fallen in the past 3 years total. I know I'm older and not in as good a shape as usual, but it think that the conditions had something to do with it. My favorite thing was when I'd fallen (slipped, really) on some ice and lost a ski. I set the ski down and started to step into the binding, but as I did, my feet slipped out and I started sliding down this very steep hill on one ski. Fortunately, I grabbed the other ski as I slid by, because I slid a good 75 feet down the hill before I was able to use my one attached ski to stop myself.

Ice aside, it's a nice mountain, not too easy and not too hard and with lots of fast lifts. The people who work here are very accommodating and the rental equipment is first-rate.

The town is kind of a mish-mosh of resorty type stuff. There are lots of places to get winter wear, which I assume convert to t-shirt shops in the summer. The restaurants are decent, though nothing special as far as I can see. I think they have to cater to the day-trippers and drinkers too much to focus completely on cuisine. We didn't have a bad meal, but there was nothing memorable about any of it. The crepe place is good, and the brewpub has surprisingly good food, though they did a huge plates on tiny tables thing that was more than a little bit irritating. We also ate at a bistro that had a kind of sports bar in the middle, with TV's showing the same hockey game on 2 different channels. The food there was fine too, but the service was awful. Everything came out at the same time, and two of the 4 orders came out wrong. But it was still nice food.

So aside from the ice problem mentioned below, I'd have to give it a thumbs up. If you actually want to know about the hotel, I'll probably review it on TripAdvisor pretty soon.

Resort Living

We're staying in one of these places that's essentially a development. There's a mountain with a ski area and then they built a "town" around it. Part of it is called the old town, but it's hard to distinguish it. It's kind of Disneyesque, or if you've ever been to Vail it's like that. Nobody lives here. The actual town is about 20 minutes away and you go there if you want to go to a supermarket. Driving there was an experience because I went on Christmas eve and it was snowing heavily and it was very very busy at the market. It's also just a little bit stressful driving around in a foreign country (maybe Canada doesn't feel foreign if you're in Toronto, but here everything is in French). Plus we have one of the worst rental cars I've ever had- a Hyundai Santa Fe if you're interested. An SUV that handles abominably in the snow and shimmies if you get over 60 miles an hour. Ugh.

You get a very odd sense of time in these places. Because I'm captive of school schedules, I'm away a lot for Christmas day, so I can see different levels of observance. In Paris, everything stops and it's hard to find anything open or anywhere to eat out (though just like at home, the Chinese restaurants are open). In Costa Rica, they have some mild level of celebration, but it's not a major holiday. In a place like this, the only difference is that the people working in the shops wear Santa hats.

We're staying at a hotel with condo rooms, so we have 3 bedrooms and a little kitchen and a living room with a gas fireplace. There's a panel on the wall where you push a button and the fire turns on and then after an hour it suddenly shuts off. They haven't mastered the slowly burning down thing. The hotel is right at the base of the slope. You walk out the back door and the bunny hill is right there (fun to watch out the window) and the real lift is about 100 feet away. There are ski lockers by that entrance and signs by the elevator that say you can't keep skies in your room. You must keep your skies in the ski lockers. It's a bilingual sign and they spell it correctly in French.

The town is on a hill and it rained last night, which pretty much turned the main drag into a big ice slide. During the day they have like a ski lift to take you from bottom to top but it's closed at night, so it took us a very long, wet time to get back up to our room. This also made for interesting skiing today, because there was about an inch of snow on top of a serious layer of ice. You could go really fast. Stopping or turning, not so much. I only fell once and never crashed into anyone, which I count as a major success.

Happy Christmas

I wish everyone to whom this day is deeply meaningful, as well as those from whom it's just a quiet day when everything's closed, a day (or maybe even more) of peace and happiness.

If you like "A Christmas Story"

You should check out In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, by Jean Shepherd. a collection of stories of life during the depression in Indiana that are excerpted to make up the movie. Shepherd, who narrates the movie, was a monologist. He had a hour long nightly show on WOR-AM in New York from the mid-1950's to the 70's, where he would come on and just talk, play the kazoo and the Jew's Harp along with 30's and and 40's novelty songs, and tell long stories about growing up in a scruffy midwestern town and his subsequent time in the army.

When I was about 11, my parents gave me a clock radio where you could turn on the radio and it would automatically turn off in an hour. This was miraculous to me, and for years I would go to bed around 10 and turn on my radio for just long enough that I could hear Jean Shepherd, who was on from 10 to 11. It was a great way to spend some time in the dark, waiting to fall asleep.

Resort Encounters

In the elevator of the hotel is one of the few places you'll see people in serious cold weather gear and people in bathing suits standing next to each other.

Hard to top the ambiance though

I'm staying in this little ski village in Quebec not only do they have snowmaking on the mountain, but they have it down in the village as well. I've been in other ski towns where they shovel the snow when it falls instead. I guess there's always more than one approach and it does look nice, but I think it's actually snowing out and I can't be sure, which is unsettling.

Update: People actually ski through town. I guess that's why there's snowmaking.

You Know A Great Many Notes

Four words to bring terror to the music lover's heart: Middle School Orchestra Concert.

I have a very acute sense of pitch. Actually our whole family does- one of my kids has perfect pitch, she can sing a note on demand or identify any note she hears. We found out because we had a Casio keyboard with the notes printed on the keys. One day my car alarm went off and my daughter, who was about 5 years old at the time, said "It's making a G sound." Anyway, for people like us, off-key music is literally painful. The concert was mercifully short.

Most Interesting Obituary Ever

Topus obituary

Or at least the most unusual in content and writing style. I don't want to lessen the effect by giving away too much, but make sure you read at least until you reach the word "delicious." And you may be interested in the Maidenform Bra connection as well.

The Failure of Arts and Crafts

Every once in a while I’ll do what might be called a manipulative project with a class. No, that doesn’t mean I teach them to manipulate those around them. These are teenagers and they’re already plenty good at that. What it means is that the students work with some solid object- manipulate it if you will. In pre-Algebra, we use something called Algebra tiles to connect math concepts to physical objects. In trigonometry it might involve using a compass and measuring angles in a circle. In Geometry, which has a more obvious connection to the physical world, we do a variety of things.

This week, we were studying medians. The medians of a triangle are the line segments connecting each vertex (corner) of the triangle to the midpoint (what it sounds like) of the opposite side. There are 3 of these in every triangle. Medians have certain properties, and they happen to all 3 cross at a single point. This is called either the median or the centroid of a triangle. This point, almost magically, is exactly 2/3 of the way from the vertex to the opposite side. It’s also the center of gravity of a triangle, which means the triangle will balance on your finger if you put your finger on that point.

So here’s the project:
1. Draw a triangle (I provided rulers to help).
2. Cut it out (scissors provided)
3. Find the midpoint of each side by folding across and matching up the corners.
4. Draw lines from the 3 midpoints to the opposite corners.
5. Measure the lines to see that the place where they all cross is 2/3 of the way from the vertex to the opposite midpoint.

Pictorial directions are given in the book. The book suggests that this activity should take between 15 and 20 minutes, which seemed a bit optimistic, but I am at a loss to describe exactly what happened when we tried to do this. Let me start by saying that in a room full of normal, reasonably intelligent students, that I was the only one to complete this task in a 30 minute period.

When the period ended, the room looked like a confetti factory and everyone was alternately laughing and tearing their hair out. Some people drew teeny triangles and couldn’t work with them. Some people completely folded the triangle and drew no lines. Some people connected the vertices with random points on the opposite side. Some connected the midpoints to random points on one of the other sides. Some made a drawing mistake and started making new triangles instead of just turning the paper over. I can say with conviction that everyone at least drew triangles and cut them out. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

I blame the system for this epic mini-disaster. These kids have clearly been deprived of the requisite arts and crafts training required to complete tasks requiring small motor skills. My own skills were honed by years of gluing popsicle sticks to each other, making collages, creating potholders with loops, flowers out of tissues and weaving paper baskets. The changeover to electronic toys and the rise of cell phones are yielding disastrous results. Not being a trained arts and crafts professional, as my mentors clearly were, I am at a loss to say how we can improve this situation. I fear for our future.

Music

For those who are unaware, Jack Johnson does a version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer that sounds just like every other Jack Johnson song.

My new favorite song is "That's Not My Name" by the Ting Tings.

Bumper Cars

Aside from the fact that you can't go into a store like a normal person this time of year, the thing that's most inconvenient for me about the holiday season is driving. I'm not sure what it is- too much Christmas Spirit (or spirits) or too much Christmas Stress, but people drive horribly during December. They're careless and overly aggressive and inattentive. Everybody's in a big hurry, to shop I suppose, and nobody gives a hoot (?) about anyone else out there. Coming home from work yesterday, I was cut off 3 times by the same car, who kept swinging into the left lane to motor on ahead, only to get stuck behind somebody left turning and then swerve back right in front of me.

Okay, I'm starting to sound like a crank so I'll stop.

You canna fool me, there ain'ta no sanity clause

As much as I despise being subjected to a month of ubiquitous Christmas music, I simply can't get annoyed upon hearing Ella Fitzgerald's scat version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

Interesting article

I just read an article, written by a colleague's daughter, about the age-old question of science versus creationism (of course, the discussion of how old the age-old discussion is is also age-old, but I'll stop now). One of its main points is that although the discussion of how we've come to exist is sometimes framed as a choice between Intelligent Design and there being a so-called multiverse, that it's usually a mistake to present complex choices in terms of only two options. It's a point I agree with heartily (as does the above-mentioned Dodecahedron from The Phantom Tollbooth).

Here's a link to the article and please leave a comment if you find it interesting. It might help a talented young writer get a shot at a regular column.

Today at the supermarket- Wholegrania and the Mystery of Turkey Ham

My daughter asked me to get her some multigrain bread, and having experienced the tedium that accompanies the use of a solitary grain, I obliged. Of course, the bread aisle is one of my favorite places anyway, so I was pleased to see that it was whole grain mania, where I had a choice of 7 grain, 9 grain, 12 grain and 15 grain, not to mention those mathphobes that just call themselves Multigrain. My daughter likes things to the max, so I went for the 15 grain, despite a suspicion that there really aren't 15 kinds of grain. It appears from the ingredients, however, that there are. And the bread is actually pretty good in spite of all those grains.

Since this same daughter doesn't eat red meat, I went to the deli counter to get some turkey ham. Here's what I don't understand. Regular turkey costs about $6.99 a pound and ham costs about $5.99 a pound. So how is that turkey ham, which I presume is regular turkey with some sort of essence of ham added, is $3.99 a pound? It's already turkey, which is $6.99, and then you've added something to it, so unless there's something really bad in what they've added, shouldn't it cost more? Just askin'