Safety is our first concern

We bought a new telephone. Our phone in the kitchen was just a crappy phone. It was hard to read the display and the range and battery life were awful. So I bought a new cordless phone. What I found what that when you buy a cordless phone, most of them are called "dual handset" phones. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I forged on. Now that it's here, I open the box and inside are two phones. What does it mean that this is dual handset as opposed to two phones? The only difference I can see is that only one of them plugs into the telephone cord on the wall. Is that what makes something a "phone" as opposed to a "handset"? Since when? I think people consider a phone to be something you use to talk to other people, not something you attach to the wall.

As for safety, the warnings here are minimal, but there was one about not using the phone during a lightning storm because of "a slight risk of shock." First of all, if you look at the wire that attaches to the phone it's not even capable of carrying household current. If lightning went through it you would just have a molten mass on the counter. But even more to the point, we're talking about a cordless phone here. You're not even physically attached to the wire. How are you going to get shocked? Maybe they mean don't use it outside under a tree during a lightning storm. Sounds like a plan.

You may be to busy to read this (Part 1)

I always feel like I'm too busy. And I am busy, but what's weird is I feel that way even when I'm not doing anything. I guess it's because no matter what I'm doing (or not doing) there's always something else I could (or should) be doing at the same time.

For example, I'm now sitting and thinking about whether I should be doing something rather than actually doing it. In fact I'm writing about thinking about what I should be doing. And thinking about writing about thinking about what I should be doing and then writing about it. Wait a second. Now not only am I not doing anything but my head is starting to hurt.

Logical traps aside, I do wonder (1) why people fill up their to do lists with more than they can possibly do, and (2) was it always like that?

Number 1 is the bigger question, and I'm not even ready to think about starting to think about it, if you know what I mean, so let's start with number 2. I've read things like Little House on the Prairie and Pride and Prejudice and it appears to me that those people spend a lot of time doing virtually nothing. But is that how they felt? Were they calm, or did poor beautiful and perfect but blind Mary and that feisty Elizabeth Bennet feel like their days were too full to keep up? It seemed to me that things were slower when I was younger. There were fewer interruption because phone calls only happened at home and in offices and they were expensive (everything in the house would screech to a halt if someone called "long distance") and there was no other way to communicate except by mail or face-to-face. Most of the modern life accelerators were invented or introduced during my lifetime- FedEx (1971), fax machines (around 1975- here's a photo of 3 of them- the white thing is a rotating cylinder on which you placed a sheet of paper. It also had a phone receiver that you put in an acoustical modem to send the signal. It took a mere 6 minutes per page), e-mail (early 1970s), personal computers (early 1980s) and cell phones (late 1980's).

There were certainly fewer things to do. I lived in New York where there were 7 TV channels, the most anywhere. Lots of people had no TV at all. So I guess we did whatever we were doing for longer periods of time [let me interject my mother's favorite 'little Frank' stories. I was allowed to watch 30 minutes of TV on school nights, so I told my mom I wanted to watch 8 minutes of one program, 5 minutes of another, 4 minutes of another and so forth. She said no. I guess I was always a multitasker.] It definitely took a lot longer to prepare dinner before frozen food and microwave ovens. I know I always felt too busy to clean my room, but beyond that I don't remember.

Enough ancient history, but it seems hard to argue that all of the present day's communication immediacy doesn't make things, well, at least seem more immediate. Whether the immediacy is actually necessary or whether things are actually more urgent than they used to be is a bigger question that I will look at in part 2 of this post.

Suprastitious

I have concluded that what I say, what I do, what I have to eat, what I wear and the way I sit in my chair have no noticeable effect on the baseball game that's on the TV.

Mauvin' On Up

I did not know what mauve was for the first half of my life and I was okay with that. Then a relative who shall be nameless, who considers his or herself to have excellent taste, replaced their bedroom carpet with a new one that was very much mauve. The rationale behind mauve is that you would be embarrassed to have a pink rug, so you add a bit of grey to it and call it mauve, but it's still pink. We made fun of the mauve carpet when we were out of the relative's earshot.

Fast-forward about 10 years and we're re-doing our bathroom. I don't want to go into home renovation detail, but we basically took a little-used room and combined it with a teeny bathroom to make a big bathroom and dressing area. Being an adult causes you to do this kind of thing from time to time, especially when you have a small, ugly bathroom. The new bathroom is almost blindingly white and very pretty (for a bathroom), but we didn't want a tile floor in the dressing area- we wanted fluffy carpet. So guess what color we picked?

I don't remember the process by which we got the mauve carpet. I'm guessing somebody suggested it and I said okay. It's fine, really. The dressing area is about 4 x 8 feet and it's mostly just like a closet. It does have a window, but we always keep the shade down because it's a dressing room. It has a full-length mirror and places to keep all of our clothes. It's nice.

So why am I bothering to mention this? Because I have discovered a serious problem with the dressing room. We have regular lights in that room. Most indoor lighting has what they call in the color business a "warm" tone. It's a bit reddish and a bit yellowish. "Cool" light is more blue. Light color is actually measured in degrees on the Kelvin scale. Warm light is in the 1500-3000 degree range and cool light is 4000 degrees plus. The color of objects is based on the colors of light that it reflects. Warm light is more pleasant, but it makes every color look warmer than it really is.

This would not pose a problem if I never left the dressing room, but I do on a daily basis. I can tell you with absolute certainty that all colors look different in a mauve dressing room than they do either outdoors or in fluorescent lighting like we have at school. The result is that on any occasion when I want to see if things will match when I get to work, it ends up being a completely wild guess. Things that seem to match perfectly in the mauve room look ridiculous in fluorescent lighting. My reaction to this is to wear black, blue and grey most of the time, along with outfits that I've worn several times before. This is boring and not my preference but is better than looking silly.

Not too many people can pull off a Snuggie as a look.

Is it possible to understand that you lack perspective about something? Or does that imply that you indeed have perspective? Now I remember why I hated philosophy class.

Notes from the weekend

We had dinner tonight and one of the dishes had orange peel in it. I don't spend a lot of time anthropomorphizing fruit, but that poor little orange looks so sad without its peel.

This was another one of those weekends where I know I was really busy but if you asked me what I did I have no idea. I know I filed some papers, if by "file" one means to put them in a box and put the box out of sight. I also watched "I Love You , Man," which was fun. I drove a lot in the rain on Saturday night, which was way too entertaining- nothing like Lincoln Drive during a flood...

Is there some reason we need 11 different kinds of paper towels? You shouldn't even be using paper towels in the first place except on rare occasions.

You know what else is sad? A sports page with no baseball games to talk about.

Sorry to repeat myself, but

If the worst thing about this time of year is pumpkin overload (anybody for a nice squash smoothie?), the best thing is that you have a couple of weeks to use the word, "spooktacular."

Tough choice- beer or cotton candy. Not both.

Tough choice- beer or cotton candy. Not both.

Good news: phillies up 6-2. Bad news: 10:00 in the top of the 5th

My Promise

I resolve to not shave for as long as the Phillies keep winning.

Actually, I pretty much haven't shaved since the first time the Phillies won the World Series.

Stern Warning

As we come into the autumn holiday season I need to repeat my annual warning against accidentally eating something that's pumpkin flavor. If pumpkin is so good, how come we don't eat it all the time?

I'm not talking about pumpkin pie. In spite of pumpkins being the last thing in the world I'd think to make a pie out of, it has this traditional thing going, plus you can substitute sweet potato pie, which actually tastes good, and get away with it. What I'm warning against is things like pumpkin latte's and pumpkin brownies. Why? Why, I ask, would you create such a thing?

Ryan Howard. un f-ing believable

Seems weird tn take my hat off for the Hooters

Oops. Not h&o. Just some guy with a bad haircut.

Hall & Oates singing national anthem? What year is it?

Couple of baseball notes

I really enjoy going to games at Citizens Bank Park. It's a very nice place to watch a baseball game, and I love the energy of the crowd. Last night I really loved the "You take steroids" chant with rhythmic applause. Pretty funny. I could easily do without any chant that ends with the word "sucks." I will plead guilt to being part of crowds in Yankee Stadium whow started it all with their classic "Boston Sucks" chant. But it's enough already. It's boring and unpleasant and not focused on the game. In the beginning, when we chanted in New York it was never during the game. It was something to do on the way out of the stadium after you won. So I'll stick with "Beat LA" and "cheater."

Regarding the baseball itself, I think that there's now tremendous pressure on the Dodgers to win both of the next two games. Even if they split and get back to LA, they still would have to beat Lee in game 7 and they didn't look quite up to that task last night. And don't think he wouldn't have stayed in the game if it was 1-0.

This Program Brought to you by...

It's always been kind amusing to me that sports programs always have advertisements that I'm not interested in. I'm too old for their target audience, but still, am I going to buy beer, razors or cars based on a commercial? Don't think so. Or cell phones. Or financial services.

So this year so far, a few things have stood out. First is the endless repetition of the Fergie and Will I Am Direct TV commercials. We're not even halfway through the baseball playoffs yet and I must have seen that spot 50 times already. Stop it! Next, I want to know what the woman in the Symbacort commercial actually looks like. I know she exists only in silhouette and that she has glowing lungs and that medicine makes them change color, but I want to know if she has a face. And finally, I have grown to despise any commercial that has things talking that don't actually talk- animals, babies and the like, but I do love the Geico commercial with the talking pothole. I think it's the voice.

I've also decided I'm going to pretend that the commercials are the first few scenes of a movie and figure out what the rest of the movie will be like. So far I like the one where the harried housewife gets a putting green to walk on from Fidelity, and we then cut to a man, (her boyfriend or husband?), talking to his reflection about whether to take drugs for his ED, as they call it these days. Then a woman joins him. Is it the same woman? Hmmm. Hope they don't hit a pothole on their way home.

Hotel news

We have blue water in our hotel office bathroom toilet. We never get blue water at home...

One more thing about the webinar

My experience is that any person or thing that calls itself "Awesome," or any other superlative, isn't.

Crimes against the language (or, Adventures in Jargonland)

I've now heard that thing I did today was called a "webinar." This is exactly why I don't like this kind of thing very much. The word seminar is defined (among other things) as a meeting of people to discuss a particular topic. It says nothing about the venue. Should we have called it an audinar if we had it in the auditorium? Or we could do it outside and call it a lawninar.

So the purpose of the program is to help teachers use 20th century techniques, specifically web-based social media tools, but anything that, according to the moderators, moves us away from our current paradigm. This is a problem for me because my brain is set to automatically shut down if someone ever uses the word paradigm. Look it up and tell me if you know what it means after reading the definition. Nobody knows what it means, which makes it extremely useful if you want to sound impressive without actually saying anything.

This is kind of how things went. The program is called something along the lines of Awesome Teaching Tools, or ATT (it's not really called that, but that's the spirit of it) and they keep talking about all the awesome things we'll do and using lots of impressive-sounding buzzwords, but nobody ever actually tells you what those things are. The one time someone asked about a specific thing they said they weren't going to tell us for a few weeks.

You can look at this two ways, certainly an Awesome teaching technique is to let everyone figure stuff out on their own, to have a voyage of discovery. Of course the cynical view is that there really isn't anything and that we'll just make it up as we go along. It reminds of an obscure Monty Python bit where this woman comes on a talk show to discuss her theory about the brontosaurus. She goes on and on and on about how wonderful her theory is until the interviewer finally has to stop her and ask, "So what is it?" And she responds, "What is what?" At which point you can't help but assume that there is no theory, she just likes talking about having a theory, (that's actually an incorrect assumption because there is a theory and it's brilliant in a Python kind of way, but that's beside the point)

So I spent 2 hours doing I have no idea what, and I guess there are worse things. But I'm not sure I want to manage transformational change around the new literacies in order to grow as a f2f professional learning team. But that's just me. Or maybe I'm already doing it and I just don't know yet. My head hurts.

Webconferencing

I just did a web conference. We had a computer screen and audio and chat. It felt kind of like watching something muted on TV and carrying on a phone conversation while 100 people around you are talking among themselves and to you the whole time.

Interesting article

Anyone interested in making connection between and within branches of science might find this article interesting. If you read through the first few paragraphs, make sure you read the last one.

54

I am now almost exactly 3 times as old as my oldest daughter. Here's what it's like to be 54 years old. It feels pretty much exactly like being 53 years old. Hmmm, that probably doesn't help much. I guess you have to split it into physical and mental.

Physically, I still feel reasonably strong and fit and energetic. Stuff hurts pretty much every day. I have a chronically sore left shoulder which hurts, according to my doctor, because I'm not dead yet. I can ease it with exercises and it doesn't stop me from doing anything, but it's annoying. And typical for someone my age. It always makes me chuckle when kids say they feel old because they woke up and their neck or their back hurts. See how you feel when that happens for about 2000 days in a row.

Mentally, the only even halfway bad thing I can think of is that I have too many stray facts stuck in my head, like what kind of Mike and Ike's my students like. It's like my brain still knows where to go but there are more obstacles to getting there.

Like any milestone, a birthday makes you reflect and think ahead. I was discussing what I want to be when I grow up with my younger daughter (she thinks it's funny but I think she's kind of used to hearing me say stuff like that), and she thinks I should be the old guy whose house kids are afraid to go near on Halloween.

My birthday itself was pretty uneventful. I went out to a wonderful dinner with friends which was a lot of fun, and that was about it. I'm impossible to buy presents for because I don't want anything, so you have to find something I'd never thought of. That gets harder at this age because every year I've had more time to think of things.

And now we've moved on to where my daughter is now 18. Time doesn't fly (and for you catching typos at the last second fans, Tim doesn't fly either); it feels like it's been a long time and a lot has happened since she was born. But still, something about birthdays makes you compress time somehow and in ways 18 years seems really short. Not 54 years though. That's a long time.

Happy Birthday to Me

I turned 54 yesterday. Not one of the highlight, emotionally charged birthdays. I had Happy Birthday sung to me in English and Hebrew and a couple of brave souls tried Spanish too, but it petered out after the words, "Happy Birthday."

Thanks for all the kind wishes. I may have some reflections or refractions to share later, but now it's time to have dinner.

Garage Sale

Is it just me or does it seem kind of sketchy to go to a neighbor's garage sale and look through their things. It just doesn't feel right to me, like it's an invasion of privacy.

Sorry About That, Chief

I had an awful fight with someone the other day. That's a pretty unusual occurrence. I'm pretty even-tempered and it's hard to get me beyond just being annoyed. Looking back on it now, it's hard for me to even see what we were fighting about. Who said something rude to someone else, I guess, but the fight itself is irrelevant.

The reason things got out of control was a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of apologies. A line sticks in my head from a book called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. There's a character who's kind of a sage, and at one point he says, "It never hurts to apologize, even if you don't really mean it." This is (purposely, I assume) overly cynical, but the germ of truth in it is that your apology is not for you. Many arguments get needlessly extended because one of both parties feels, "I didn't do anything wrong, why should I apologize?"

Well here's why. Let's say that you do something that's clearly wrong, like forget a meeting and leave someone sitting and waiting for an hour. Of course, you apologize for that. But what does that do? Does it somehow undo the wrong? Does that person get his or her hour back? If you broke something of theirs does it get unbroken? Of course not. The purpose of the apology is to make them feel better. That's always what apologies are for. It has nothing to do with whether you were right or wrong, it's about how the other person feels.

So one of the skills I've picked up over the course of a lifetime is the understanding of how and when to apologize. Little apologies at the beginning of or arguments can help keep the argument small and short. The skill to it is to really understand what the other person is saying and why they're saying it. You need not actually feel sorry but you'd sure better know what it is you're apologizing for. You have to listen and to think about the other person. That's hard, and I didn't learn how to do that until I was around 40. But it's well worth learning.

Portapotties sure have improved. Toilet paper? HAND SANITIZER?

Whew!

I'm woozy. It was hard to go from not conversing with anyone aside from my family for 10 days to teaching 55 kids.

Have I mentioned that I'm tired of talking about college? It's not even safe to walk the dog.

I really want one of those paintball guns like Ari had in the finale of Entourage. How much fun would that be? I've always been intrigued by my inner battle over whether or not to do that kind of stuff. My usual MO is to think all of all of these great mischievous things to do to people, but I rarely do them. I just don't like upsetting people, but I love the idea of practical jokes. I took a personality test once and two of the strongest traits were "people pleaser" and "bomb thrower." That about covers it.

School's getting serious now. No days off until November 19 and lots and lots of stuff to do. This is the hardest part of the year and one of my favorite times as well, because it's a rare opportunity to dig into things without interruption.

Shoot the TV

I know that the "rollover minutes" mom on the AT&T commercials is supposed to be annoying, but kind of in a funny way. Well, they got half of it right. I do kinda like to point her out as an example to my kids when they tell me I'm being unreasonable about something.

Baseball talk

I just heard a baseball announcer say that the Boston Red Sox had outed the LA Angels the last 4 times they were in the playoffs. The proper term, I think, is "ousted." To the best of my knowledge, "outed " has a different meaning.

As if anyone needed to write more about the Beatles

My father used to read the obituaries, something I thought odd as a child, but he said that there were stories about really interesting people all the time. And I have to admit that now I also at least glance at them on a pretty regular basis. Today I spotted the following, Lucy Vodden, 46; Inspired a Beatles song. Part of what caught my eye was her age, which seemed awfully young until I read the story and found that she was a school friend of John Lennon's son Julian.

There's plenty of buzz about the Beatles these days and I hope Rock Band fans are enjoying the game. The thing I wanted to note was that one of the things that make their music so enduring is that it was totally non-formulaic from the very beginning. If you take the time to sit and listen to their music you will hear that every single song has elements of complexity that no other rock band at the time and very few since ever achieved. Even "She Loves You," (not available on iTunes) completely familiar and straightforward, right? Listen to the first 20 seconds and follow the chord changes and harmonies. Or better yet, listen to all 2:19 of it. It's a brilliant piece of songwriting and performance. If you look at the tabs you see there are 8 named chords, 3 more that are invented chords and one place where the harmonies swerve so quickly it just says NC (no chord). I have a strong musical background and I can't even tell whether or not the key changes, (for the non-musical among us, a typical song has around 4 chords). No wonder nobody else sounds like them (and none of their songs sound like any other).

BTW, if you wonder why people my age (at least those who pay attention) think most current popular music is lousy, it's not because it's too cool or modern or raw, it's because it's BORING.