It's one thing to report on what one does on a vacation-type trip, it's another to really think about what happened, what the trip was about. The reporting is usually kind of shallow, but it serves a purpose in helping me remember things I might have lost over the course of time, but I'm not sure how interesting it is.
What spurred me to think about this was a brochure that I seem to have brought home called "The National Archives Experience." The brochure contains the sort of stuff one would normally find at an attraction, a map of exhibits, some verbiage on same and scattered pictures of happy visitors enjoying the premises. It just struck me as odd that they're equating a list of what there is to do with the experience itself. There are lots of things to do at the Archives, but I can tell you exactly what most people's experience is:
You walk in, you go through a metal detector, as you do pretty much anywhere you go in Washington. In fact, if I had to summarize The Washington Experience it would be a kind of serial airport security activity, except with exhibits instead of airplanes. I was pleased that they didn't need to search me when I went to Trader Joe's. After passing through security, you look for signs that say Rotunda, because that's where the famous documents are. Follow them and then find yourself in a very long line with markers like at Disney World about how long you would have to wait from any given point.
You wait in line anywhere from 15 minutes (us) to over an hour (any busier time). This gives you the opportunity to watch the provided introductory video 8 or 9 times. Eventually, they let you in with a group of around 40 people and you all make a beeline for the Declaration of Independence, then move clockwise to the Constitution while you complain that the Declaration is so faded you can't see it and that it's too dark in the room. Then maybe to the Bill of Rights if you're still interested. This takes around 15 minutes. You then go to the gift shop and buy a facsimile copy of the Declaration and then you leave.
I can assure you this is not the experience described in the brochure. I'm sure some people visit the other exhibits, but not when I was there.
Archives aside, Washington was summarized for me once by a friend who'd gone to school at GWU with "You gotta like your big white buildings." This could not be more true. After we got out of the Holocaust Museum and wanted to get lunch, the entire next square block, which is probably 3 square blocks anywhere in Philadelphia, is taken up by the Department of Agriculture building. It's very impressive, but you have a hard time convincing me that you need a building that big for anything. The Mall is other side of the street, so the area is completely barren of anything to see, do or eat. Much of downtown Washington is like that, and though I'm always a willing walker, it's a bit much to deal with a half mile walk just on the chance there might be something on the other side (especially since there might not).
Thank goodness for the Starbucks app, which though we never set foot in Starbucks, would lead us to areas where there might be something to eat or drink. As city people, this was distressing to both my daughter and me, because some level of street life is part of what defines a city. I know enough about urban planning to know that you can't have any sort of street life if there's no reason for anyone to be on the street. That's why downtown parking lots are awful, they're just dead space. Large parts of Washington are nothing but dead space for that exact reason. It's more attractive dead space than a surface parking lot, but no better in many ways.
The only pace we saw real street life was in Georgetown, which has lots of things going on at street level and the landscape is not dominated by cars. Though they do have those odd Walk/Don't Walk signals that start counting down from 50 or 60. Those are a function of wide streets, which are also not so good for street life.
Overall, I guess Washington is okay to visit. The quality of the attractions makes up for its negatives, at least for a short visit. But since I tend to divide places into "could live there" versus "couldn't live there" this would have to fall into the couldn't live there category.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Washington, Day Two
Got kind of a late start on day two. First stop was the Newseum. This is a new museum, about the news media, and it is a gem. We started off at the lower level, where we saw an exhibition of photographs by Neil Leifer, who has about 200 covers of Time and Sports Illustrated to this credit (most famous one- Ali standing over Sonny Liston after knocking him out). You then take an elevator up to the top and walk around the the atrium and down a level at a time. This seems to be the standard arrangement these days, and I think it started with the Guggenheim in New York, which spirals down in such a manner as to tempt even the most hypothetical of skateboarders.
I grew up not so much a news junkie as a newspaper junkie. Breakfast for me has always meant sitting with a daily newspaper, starting with the sports section and then moving on to whatever looks interesting. Today, for instance, the New York Times had an article about how online retailers are targeting people who have been drinking because they are more likely to impulse buy. In any event, this place was like heaven for me. It's the history of news, starting with printing presses and up through citizen journalism. In between they have hundreds of newspapers in drawers with headlines about every important story since the Civil War. I could have spent hours there and probably will some day.
They have a bunch of other cool stuff too, from a bullet-dented-but-not-penetrated armored truck that protected a journalist working in Africa, to a piece of the Berlin Wall and part of the antenna that sat atop World Trade Center building number 1 against a backdrop of dozens of newspaper front pages.
We needed food at that point, and after yesterday, when we'd walked for almost 3 miles without passing any sort of food-selling thing, (Washington is very strange that way. Many of the buildings are so huge that they block out all street life), we were concerned if we'd find something, especially since it was pouring. But fortunately, there was a Cosi across the street where we huddled and ate, during which time the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared.
From there we scurried inside the National Archives as they were closing their doors and saw the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, things I hadn't seen since I was a kid. They're pretty badly faded but still recognizable, especially the big "We The People."
Then we spent a couple of hours in the Natural History Museum, which is always fun. Then back to drop some stuff at the hotel and then over to a place called Blues Alley. This is a small Georgetown Club that has live jazz most nights. I'd never heard of the guy who was playing. He's an 80-ish pianist who's a fixture of the DC jazz scene. He was very good and the rest of the band too, especially the guitarist. The set was too short (exactly 70 minutes, just like Yelp reviewers had said) but enjoyable.
And that was pretty much it. We had a good time with almost everything. I have a bit more to say about the hotel but will send that along tomorrow.
I grew up not so much a news junkie as a newspaper junkie. Breakfast for me has always meant sitting with a daily newspaper, starting with the sports section and then moving on to whatever looks interesting. Today, for instance, the New York Times had an article about how online retailers are targeting people who have been drinking because they are more likely to impulse buy. In any event, this place was like heaven for me. It's the history of news, starting with printing presses and up through citizen journalism. In between they have hundreds of newspapers in drawers with headlines about every important story since the Civil War. I could have spent hours there and probably will some day.
They have a bunch of other cool stuff too, from a bullet-dented-but-not-penetrated armored truck that protected a journalist working in Africa, to a piece of the Berlin Wall and part of the antenna that sat atop World Trade Center building number 1 against a backdrop of dozens of newspaper front pages.
We needed food at that point, and after yesterday, when we'd walked for almost 3 miles without passing any sort of food-selling thing, (Washington is very strange that way. Many of the buildings are so huge that they block out all street life), we were concerned if we'd find something, especially since it was pouring. But fortunately, there was a Cosi across the street where we huddled and ate, during which time the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared.
From there we scurried inside the National Archives as they were closing their doors and saw the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, things I hadn't seen since I was a kid. They're pretty badly faded but still recognizable, especially the big "We The People."
Then we spent a couple of hours in the Natural History Museum, which is always fun. Then back to drop some stuff at the hotel and then over to a place called Blues Alley. This is a small Georgetown Club that has live jazz most nights. I'd never heard of the guy who was playing. He's an 80-ish pianist who's a fixture of the DC jazz scene. He was very good and the rest of the band too, especially the guitarist. The set was too short (exactly 70 minutes, just like Yelp reviewers had said) but enjoyable.
And that was pretty much it. We had a good time with almost everything. I have a bit more to say about the hotel but will send that along tomorrow.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Day One in Washington
I've not spent much time in Washington. I guess I have the same lack of interest as my parents, as I think we came here exactly once when I was growing up, around 1964. All I remember was the Wright Brothers plane because I was obsessed with the Wright Brothers at the time and seeing JFK's grave at Arlington Cemetery, though I also remember my father giving me hard time for being whiny while standing on line to see the grave. I came down once for a day with biz school friends, and I brought my kids down for a weekend once but nobody ever was interested in going again.
This time, I was looking for a place that was close enough to go for a short time where there was a reasonable variety of stuff to do. So here I am.
This day played out like most days we're on vacation. I get up long before anyone else in my family even thinks about it. I really can't stay in bed past 8:30, maybe 9 and the others are all happy staying in bed until 11 if not prompted to do otherwise. This is fine with me. I love my family but getting up early gives me a chance to have my own space.
Whenever we travel I go for morning walks with no particular destination or route in mind. I best way I can describe it is that I want to know where I am. Whether this is inherently interesting or not depends obviously on where we're staying. Right now we're staying in an area heavy with Embassies and not too far from Georgetown, so I headed over that way.
I've been in Georgetown, but not for many years and my memory is foggy enough that I suspect I'd been bar hopping before getting there. I'm not sure. But it's a very nice place to walk on a cold morning before the stores are open. The commercial street is varied enough that it doesn't look like a mall and the side streets are beautiful, lined with pretty old houses and brick sidewalks. It's not unlike parts of Old City in Philadelphia, but more upscale looking. The main drag exhibits the split personality of the place. It's a very upscale college area, so the stores are mostly pretty high end, like Kate Spade and MaxMara, but the food places are all pizza, pubs, and various Asian, Indian and Mexican restaurants.
On the way I crossed over a nice park alongside a stream. If it were warmer I'd have taken one of the bikes that the hotel has for guests (they also have rental bikes on the street like in Paris) but walking across was fine.
Once back my daughter arose and we headed out for a fun-filled day of looking at things about dead people. I know that sounds flip, but package together the Lincoln Memorial, followed by the Vietnam War Memorial and then the Holocaust Museum and that's a lot of dead people. Oddly enough, I enjoyed it thoroughly. The Lincoln Memorial is familiar from pictures but that sucker's big. The text of his Second Inaugural Address, one of the great speeches of the modern age, is on one of the walls and it nearly moved me to tears to read it in that spot.
As aware as I was of the building of the Vietnam War Memorial, I never had a sense for what it looked like and I was almost thrown by its scale and simplicity. Walking slowly along, seeing name after name after name, brought the entire tragedy top of mind again. I was lucky enough to have been too young to get drafted. My 18th birthday year was the last year of the dreaded draft lottery and I was assigned a number, but the war had ended, they did not draft anyone born in 1955, and they eliminated the draft soon afterward.
The Holocaust Museum was more of an immersive experience. I have some issues with the design of the place. There was some interesting and important information displays in places that were bottlenecks for the good-sized crowd and it was tough to see some things. But you can't deny the power of story and you can't not feel the weight of the horror. My family on both sides left Europe even before World War I so I have no relatives who were involved. But I certainly know plenty of people who do, and you can't feel Jewish and not feel the pain.
At this point we'd had enough death and despair and wanted to get something to eat, so we cabbed it to Georgetown, where we had lunch and then walked up and down the street and looked and occasionally shopped in stores. Finally dinner at the hotel, the highlight of which were perhaps the most amazing french fries I've ever had. The taste was the good news, the fact that they were fried in duck fat is perhaps not such good news, buit they were very delicious and I was able to eat less than half of them.
This time, I was looking for a place that was close enough to go for a short time where there was a reasonable variety of stuff to do. So here I am.
This day played out like most days we're on vacation. I get up long before anyone else in my family even thinks about it. I really can't stay in bed past 8:30, maybe 9 and the others are all happy staying in bed until 11 if not prompted to do otherwise. This is fine with me. I love my family but getting up early gives me a chance to have my own space.
Whenever we travel I go for morning walks with no particular destination or route in mind. I best way I can describe it is that I want to know where I am. Whether this is inherently interesting or not depends obviously on where we're staying. Right now we're staying in an area heavy with Embassies and not too far from Georgetown, so I headed over that way.
I've been in Georgetown, but not for many years and my memory is foggy enough that I suspect I'd been bar hopping before getting there. I'm not sure. But it's a very nice place to walk on a cold morning before the stores are open. The commercial street is varied enough that it doesn't look like a mall and the side streets are beautiful, lined with pretty old houses and brick sidewalks. It's not unlike parts of Old City in Philadelphia, but more upscale looking. The main drag exhibits the split personality of the place. It's a very upscale college area, so the stores are mostly pretty high end, like Kate Spade and MaxMara, but the food places are all pizza, pubs, and various Asian, Indian and Mexican restaurants.
On the way I crossed over a nice park alongside a stream. If it were warmer I'd have taken one of the bikes that the hotel has for guests (they also have rental bikes on the street like in Paris) but walking across was fine.
Once back my daughter arose and we headed out for a fun-filled day of looking at things about dead people. I know that sounds flip, but package together the Lincoln Memorial, followed by the Vietnam War Memorial and then the Holocaust Museum and that's a lot of dead people. Oddly enough, I enjoyed it thoroughly. The Lincoln Memorial is familiar from pictures but that sucker's big. The text of his Second Inaugural Address, one of the great speeches of the modern age, is on one of the walls and it nearly moved me to tears to read it in that spot.
As aware as I was of the building of the Vietnam War Memorial, I never had a sense for what it looked like and I was almost thrown by its scale and simplicity. Walking slowly along, seeing name after name after name, brought the entire tragedy top of mind again. I was lucky enough to have been too young to get drafted. My 18th birthday year was the last year of the dreaded draft lottery and I was assigned a number, but the war had ended, they did not draft anyone born in 1955, and they eliminated the draft soon afterward.
The Holocaust Museum was more of an immersive experience. I have some issues with the design of the place. There was some interesting and important information displays in places that were bottlenecks for the good-sized crowd and it was tough to see some things. But you can't deny the power of story and you can't not feel the weight of the horror. My family on both sides left Europe even before World War I so I have no relatives who were involved. But I certainly know plenty of people who do, and you can't feel Jewish and not feel the pain.
At this point we'd had enough death and despair and wanted to get something to eat, so we cabbed it to Georgetown, where we had lunch and then walked up and down the street and looked and occasionally shopped in stores. Finally dinner at the hotel, the highlight of which were perhaps the most amazing french fries I've ever had. The taste was the good news, the fact that they were fried in duck fat is perhaps not such good news, buit they were very delicious and I was able to eat less than half of them.
Stumbling into luxury
Once again, I'm on the road. This time I'm in Washington, DC with my older daughter, who recently finished finals.
The train trip here was easy enough and we caught a cab to the hotel. The hotel. Let me tell you about the hotel. As I usually do, I went on Tripadvisor to scout. Tripadvisor is a good site, but like any other review site you need to learn to read it properly to get the information you want. If you look at one or two reviews you can get a skewed, even inaccurate impression, and if the reports are too specific you need to evaluate them carefully. I look for commonalities, consistent themes and reports. Then I check prices.
I settled this time on a hotel called the Park Hyatt. It had great reviews, was considered to be among the best hotels in the city, and for some reason was barely more expensive than most of the other nice hotels. I have no idea why this was the case. I've stayed in Hyatt, Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Place hotels, but none of them were anything like this.
First of all, it's barely marked. There's a small lighted sign at ground level at the corner, but you'd be hard pressed to see it. There's nothing on the front of the hotel itself. I had debated reserving upgraded accommodations, but I just had a sense that if I could get rooms for less than half of what they usually cost, that the hotel might be empty enough that I could get that without having to reserve and therefore pay for it.
Happily, this proved to be the case. We were both upgraded to junior suites that connected. The rooms are made up of a living area and a sleeping area separated by a partial wall. THe living area has a desk and some comfortable chairs. The sleeping area has a bed and the usual bed-related stuff. The bathroom is huge and has one of those rain showers in an open area of one end. The closet space has enough to either stay for a week or make a complete outfit change 3 or 4 times a day for a weekend. My favorite touch is that the safe has an outlet inside so you can charge your laptop while you're out.
I'm going to skip ahead in time to give you an idea of the level of service in this place. The next day I wanted some beer to have in the room so I wouldn't have to use the motion-activated-you-lift-it you've-bought-it minibar. Normally, I would ask a hotel's front desk where I could go to get beer, but I know if I did that here that they would insist on going out and getting it for me. Oh, and my daughter said she didn't like the pillows, which are much mushier than the memory foam pillows we have at home. So I called housekeeping to ask if they had that kind of pillow and they responded, "We will get them for you and once they are in the building we shall place them in your room." Now I'm not sure that means they went out and bought us pillows, but it might.
Oh yeah, and then there's the Internet thing. One of the most infuriating things about staying in nice hotels is that, unlike a places like Hampton Inn or Motel 6, you have to pay for Wifi. There's no justification for this; making Wifi available in a hotel costs them almost nothing and yet they're perfectly comfortable charging you $10 a day for it, unless you're a high level frequent guest. So here the bellman seemed almost perturbed at the notion that we might have to pay for Internet and so brought us an access code for one computer and had the guest services person call and say not to worry that they would take the charges off the bill. This should serve notice to anyone ever staying at a nice hotel that you should ask for almost anything because they just might do it for you.
The train trip here was easy enough and we caught a cab to the hotel. The hotel. Let me tell you about the hotel. As I usually do, I went on Tripadvisor to scout. Tripadvisor is a good site, but like any other review site you need to learn to read it properly to get the information you want. If you look at one or two reviews you can get a skewed, even inaccurate impression, and if the reports are too specific you need to evaluate them carefully. I look for commonalities, consistent themes and reports. Then I check prices.
I settled this time on a hotel called the Park Hyatt. It had great reviews, was considered to be among the best hotels in the city, and for some reason was barely more expensive than most of the other nice hotels. I have no idea why this was the case. I've stayed in Hyatt, Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Place hotels, but none of them were anything like this.
First of all, it's barely marked. There's a small lighted sign at ground level at the corner, but you'd be hard pressed to see it. There's nothing on the front of the hotel itself. I had debated reserving upgraded accommodations, but I just had a sense that if I could get rooms for less than half of what they usually cost, that the hotel might be empty enough that I could get that without having to reserve and therefore pay for it.
Happily, this proved to be the case. We were both upgraded to junior suites that connected. The rooms are made up of a living area and a sleeping area separated by a partial wall. THe living area has a desk and some comfortable chairs. The sleeping area has a bed and the usual bed-related stuff. The bathroom is huge and has one of those rain showers in an open area of one end. The closet space has enough to either stay for a week or make a complete outfit change 3 or 4 times a day for a weekend. My favorite touch is that the safe has an outlet inside so you can charge your laptop while you're out.
I'm going to skip ahead in time to give you an idea of the level of service in this place. The next day I wanted some beer to have in the room so I wouldn't have to use the motion-activated-you-lift-it you've-bought-it minibar. Normally, I would ask a hotel's front desk where I could go to get beer, but I know if I did that here that they would insist on going out and getting it for me. Oh, and my daughter said she didn't like the pillows, which are much mushier than the memory foam pillows we have at home. So I called housekeeping to ask if they had that kind of pillow and they responded, "We will get them for you and once they are in the building we shall place them in your room." Now I'm not sure that means they went out and bought us pillows, but it might.
Oh yeah, and then there's the Internet thing. One of the most infuriating things about staying in nice hotels is that, unlike a places like Hampton Inn or Motel 6, you have to pay for Wifi. There's no justification for this; making Wifi available in a hotel costs them almost nothing and yet they're perfectly comfortable charging you $10 a day for it, unless you're a high level frequent guest. So here the bellman seemed almost perturbed at the notion that we might have to pay for Internet and so brought us an access code for one computer and had the guest services person call and say not to worry that they would take the charges off the bill. This should serve notice to anyone ever staying at a nice hotel that you should ask for almost anything because they just might do it for you.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Small sample size theater
When you're evaluating a baseball player, you always approach with caution even the best statistics compiled for only 50 at bats or so. Why? Because everybody knows that baseball is the game where you have 600 or 700 at-bats in a year and 50 at bats is not enough to make a judgment of how a batter will perform over an entire season.
The technical term for this is sample size error. What it means is that you don't have enough information to make a well-informed decision. With that in mind, let me tell you all about Tucson, Arizona.
Tucson looks at first glance to be in the desert but actually it rains here almost constantly. I went for a hike yesterday and I have to take my shoes off four times across little rivers (they called them "washes," that's a laugh- I got all muddy). There also signs everywhere that say Do Not Enter If Flooded. This is such good advice that I'm resolved to follow it in all circumstances, but I've never seen them anywhere else so it must flood here a lot. So why are there so many cacti around? I don't understand. It's also really cold the temperature doesn't seem to get much above 50 and it goes down into the upper 20s at night.
They also have signs everywhere saying high fire danger but I don't understand how that can be when it's raining all the time. In fact, I've not seen anything or anyone on fire since I've been here.
It's also dark almost all the time here. The sun doesn't rise until after 8 o'clock in the morning. Then it's just dark because of the cloud cover. I guess this explains why it's deserted. There are almost no people here. The hotel where I'm staying looks like it has room for 1000 people or so and yet I seem to be the only person there except for the staff.
They make all the buildings here the same color as the landscape so that you can't find them. "Where is that place?" "Make a right after the blow-slung brownish building that looks like every other building within 100 square miles." Thank God for brightly colored plastic signs or I never would have found anything.
In sum, based on my experience Tucson is nothing like what they say it is.
The technical term for this is sample size error. What it means is that you don't have enough information to make a well-informed decision. With that in mind, let me tell you all about Tucson, Arizona.
Tucson looks at first glance to be in the desert but actually it rains here almost constantly. I went for a hike yesterday and I have to take my shoes off four times across little rivers (they called them "washes," that's a laugh- I got all muddy). There also signs everywhere that say Do Not Enter If Flooded. This is such good advice that I'm resolved to follow it in all circumstances, but I've never seen them anywhere else so it must flood here a lot. So why are there so many cacti around? I don't understand. It's also really cold the temperature doesn't seem to get much above 50 and it goes down into the upper 20s at night.
They also have signs everywhere saying high fire danger but I don't understand how that can be when it's raining all the time. In fact, I've not seen anything or anyone on fire since I've been here.
It's also dark almost all the time here. The sun doesn't rise until after 8 o'clock in the morning. Then it's just dark because of the cloud cover. I guess this explains why it's deserted. There are almost no people here. The hotel where I'm staying looks like it has room for 1000 people or so and yet I seem to be the only person there except for the staff.
They make all the buildings here the same color as the landscape so that you can't find them. "Where is that place?" "Make a right after the blow-slung brownish building that looks like every other building within 100 square miles." Thank God for brightly colored plastic signs or I never would have found anything.
In sum, based on my experience Tucson is nothing like what they say it is.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Some impressions of Tucson
I'm in Tucson, Arizona doing an errand of sorts. I've never been here before. It is about as different-looking from Philadelphia as you could possibly get. Thanks to Siri, I'm writing this as I'm driving along the road called Miracle Mile. I've been down this road several times in the last couple of days and I still have no idea what the miracle part of it is. The only miraculous thing I can think of is how many strip malls they've managed to cram into a mile of road. I have yet to get into downtown Tucson. During the day today I went hiking in the mountains, and then it started to rain so I was back at the hotel mostly writing report cards.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised because so much of the construction here is new, but almost everything I see here is a chain store of some sort, including all the restaurants. I had to drive quite a ways to get dinner at a place that was not a Red Lobster or Chili's or someplace else where I could've eaten at (according to Siri, easily kidnapped) in Philadelphia. I guess the stuff that's here is the stuff that peoples want it but just how many Target's do you need? I passed three between the airport and the hotel, and it's not that far.
Tonight I went for Mexican food. I drove all the way to South Tucson to this little family type restaurant. The specialty of the house is called the President's platter in honor of Bill Clinton who had this particular meal there about 10 years ago. My parents have met Bill Clinton, who rented house in Martha's Vineyard not far from where their house is. I've not met him, but I know enough about him to know that if he ordered something for dinner that I wouldn't be able to finish it. And sure enough, it was a little bit like a tasting menu at a fancy restaurant, except that on the tasting menu they give you little bits of everything that they make. Here, they give you full size portions of everything that they make. It featured a tostada taco chili Reno a tamale and an enchilada. Fortunately, I was pretty hungry and I felt comfortable enough eating about half of it. It was good, just way way way too much food.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised because so much of the construction here is new, but almost everything I see here is a chain store of some sort, including all the restaurants. I had to drive quite a ways to get dinner at a place that was not a Red Lobster or Chili's or someplace else where I could've eaten at (according to Siri, easily kidnapped) in Philadelphia. I guess the stuff that's here is the stuff that peoples want it but just how many Target's do you need? I passed three between the airport and the hotel, and it's not that far.
Tonight I went for Mexican food. I drove all the way to South Tucson to this little family type restaurant. The specialty of the house is called the President's platter in honor of Bill Clinton who had this particular meal there about 10 years ago. My parents have met Bill Clinton, who rented house in Martha's Vineyard not far from where their house is. I've not met him, but I know enough about him to know that if he ordered something for dinner that I wouldn't be able to finish it. And sure enough, it was a little bit like a tasting menu at a fancy restaurant, except that on the tasting menu they give you little bits of everything that they make. Here, they give you full size portions of everything that they make. It featured a tostada taco chili Reno a tamale and an enchilada. Fortunately, I was pretty hungry and I felt comfortable enough eating about half of it. It was good, just way way way too much food.
Enroot
Currently sitting at the airport bar in Sky Harbor airport, the self-proclaimed "friendliest airport in America," located somewhere in the vicinity of Phoenix, Arizona. I am on my way for a short, not particularly pleasant, but necessary trip to Tucson for a couple of days. I'll add some pictures tomorrow but there's nothing to see right now. It's around 10 PM and a lot of stuff in the airport is closed. Not the bar, fortunately. The janitorial staff is wheeling big carts full of garbage around. They didn't seem particularly friendly, though I suppose it's not the same to say that the airport itself is friendly as to say the people who work there are friendly.
The bar is okay, though they don't have any munchies. How can you be in the Southwest and not have chips and salsa on the menu? Seems sacrilegious to me (and is it just me or does that word look like it's spelled funny). Fortunately, I have a bag of peanuts in my bag and am sneakily eating them with my beer.
Anyway, 5 hours from Philly to Phoenix and now another 45 minutes or so to Tucson. I could have driven, I suppose, but it's 200 miles and I just wasn't into the idea. The flight was uneventful, which is about as much as you can want from a 5-hours-in-coach experience. I spent most of it listening to music and writing report cards (due at midnight Eastern time tomorrow- gotta remember the time difference!), until they took my portable electronic devices away.
Nothing more to report. I'll have more to say tomorrow after I've explored a bit.
The bar is okay, though they don't have any munchies. How can you be in the Southwest and not have chips and salsa on the menu? Seems sacrilegious to me (and is it just me or does that word look like it's spelled funny). Fortunately, I have a bag of peanuts in my bag and am sneakily eating them with my beer.
Anyway, 5 hours from Philly to Phoenix and now another 45 minutes or so to Tucson. I could have driven, I suppose, but it's 200 miles and I just wasn't into the idea. The flight was uneventful, which is about as much as you can want from a 5-hours-in-coach experience. I spent most of it listening to music and writing report cards (due at midnight Eastern time tomorrow- gotta remember the time difference!), until they took my portable electronic devices away.
Nothing more to report. I'll have more to say tomorrow after I've explored a bit.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Near my house, they opened one of those trails that used to be railroad tracks. I went for a walk on the trail the other morning and I liked it.
I think a big reason people like these trails is that they're flat. Trains are not good at climbing hills, that's why the transcontinental railroad took so long to complete (okay, that one's long too). I remember reading somewhere that a train can only climb a 3% grade, which means for each hundred feet it goes forward if you can only go 3 feet up. This makes train rights of way pleasant for bicycling and walking, provided there are no trains there of course.
There's another reason I like it though. Nobody does anything to make their house or business look good from the train tracks. Usually it's an area that's at best neglected and at worst trashed. In the case of people's houses, your looking at their backyards from a perspective you never get if you're walking out back of your house. There are no Corinthian columns, Restoration Hardware wooden benches or porch swings or interesting stonework. Instead, you have screen doors, plastic chairs and stucco.
Not that there's anything wrong with or unusual about that. New York's City Hall was built with an impressive marble facade but a plain brownstone back because it sat on the northernmost point of the city and the time and the city fathers were sure nobody would ever have the opportunity to see the back because it was all wilderness back there. Kind of like now but with Starbucks.
Walking along the trail, it almost feels like I'm peeking into someone's private life. This was at 7AM on a cold weekend day so there was nobody in back of anyone's home, but it all seemed terribly exposed to me- no fence or anything separating the likes of me from someone else's backyard. Does that mean if I want to bail out I can just walk down someone's driveway? I think not, but there's nothing saying so. I kept looking for No Trespassing signs, but there were none to be found.
After about 20 minutes I arrived at a legit way to leave the path, at a town park. I decided to exit there and walk back home, but as soon as I started I realized that my house is up a fairly steep hill from the park. How did I get down there? I didn't notice walking downhill. I will have to try it in the other direction because if I can walk down to the park and then return without having to walk uphill, we have some serious magic going on.
I think a big reason people like these trails is that they're flat. Trains are not good at climbing hills, that's why the transcontinental railroad took so long to complete (okay, that one's long too). I remember reading somewhere that a train can only climb a 3% grade, which means for each hundred feet it goes forward if you can only go 3 feet up. This makes train rights of way pleasant for bicycling and walking, provided there are no trains there of course.
There's another reason I like it though. Nobody does anything to make their house or business look good from the train tracks. Usually it's an area that's at best neglected and at worst trashed. In the case of people's houses, your looking at their backyards from a perspective you never get if you're walking out back of your house. There are no Corinthian columns, Restoration Hardware wooden benches or porch swings or interesting stonework. Instead, you have screen doors, plastic chairs and stucco.
Not that there's anything wrong with or unusual about that. New York's City Hall was built with an impressive marble facade but a plain brownstone back because it sat on the northernmost point of the city and the time and the city fathers were sure nobody would ever have the opportunity to see the back because it was all wilderness back there. Kind of like now but with Starbucks.
Walking along the trail, it almost feels like I'm peeking into someone's private life. This was at 7AM on a cold weekend day so there was nobody in back of anyone's home, but it all seemed terribly exposed to me- no fence or anything separating the likes of me from someone else's backyard. Does that mean if I want to bail out I can just walk down someone's driveway? I think not, but there's nothing saying so. I kept looking for No Trespassing signs, but there were none to be found.
After about 20 minutes I arrived at a legit way to leave the path, at a town park. I decided to exit there and walk back home, but as soon as I started I realized that my house is up a fairly steep hill from the park. How did I get down there? I didn't notice walking downhill. I will have to try it in the other direction because if I can walk down to the park and then return without having to walk uphill, we have some serious magic going on.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Tebowmania
There's been a lot of chatter recently about Tim Tebow, the quarterback of some NFL team that I don't care about. He's put together an impressive string of comeback victories, confounding those who doubted his football ability. Of course, we'll know he's actually good when he doesn't have to keep coming back in order to win, but that's another story.
Talk about Tebow is only partially about football, though; it invariably transitions into the place of religion in sports. He's referred to as being the most devout Christian athlete and such. He's certainly the most vocal about his faith, and that's the point of the controversy, I think.Although Tebow may be as devoted as any pro athlete, I don't really believe that he's the most devout. Since there's no scale of measurement for devoutness, nor is there even any consensus as to how to measure such a thing, that's an impossible statement to make.
What Tebow does that makes him controversial, at least in my eyes, is that he uses his position as a public figure to advertise his devoutness. When he put legible-on-TV bible chapter and verse numbers on the black gook those guys where under their eyes, that was the last straw for me. Anyone that desperate to shout "Look at me!" for any reason, perhaps faith most of all, is not any kind of role model for anything good.
The funny thing is, the fact that he's not really prosthelytizing is what makes his behavior so annoying. Those verses in the black gook? It's gibberish to a decent portion of the population and an "Oh, I've got to look this up" moment for many more.
If Tebow's point is that he's a person of faith who is proud of that fact, it's prideful but maybe acceptable. If he is in any way implying that he is more successful than others because of his faith, well that's arrogant and downright insulting to almost everyone else, whatever their beliefs. So people who dislike Tebow aren't anti-religion, they're anti-braggart.
Talk about Tebow is only partially about football, though; it invariably transitions into the place of religion in sports. He's referred to as being the most devout Christian athlete and such. He's certainly the most vocal about his faith, and that's the point of the controversy, I think.Although Tebow may be as devoted as any pro athlete, I don't really believe that he's the most devout. Since there's no scale of measurement for devoutness, nor is there even any consensus as to how to measure such a thing, that's an impossible statement to make.
What Tebow does that makes him controversial, at least in my eyes, is that he uses his position as a public figure to advertise his devoutness. When he put legible-on-TV bible chapter and verse numbers on the black gook those guys where under their eyes, that was the last straw for me. Anyone that desperate to shout "Look at me!" for any reason, perhaps faith most of all, is not any kind of role model for anything good.
The funny thing is, the fact that he's not really prosthelytizing is what makes his behavior so annoying. Those verses in the black gook? It's gibberish to a decent portion of the population and an "Oh, I've got to look this up" moment for many more.
If Tebow's point is that he's a person of faith who is proud of that fact, it's prideful but maybe acceptable. If he is in any way implying that he is more successful than others because of his faith, well that's arrogant and downright insulting to almost everyone else, whatever their beliefs. So people who dislike Tebow aren't anti-religion, they're anti-braggart.
Friday, December 09, 2011
Intermissient musings
I can't think of a better opportunity to meditate on entropy than at a school band concert. Entropy is a complex topic, which is perhaps best understood as a lack of order. Everything in the universe tends toward disorder and it requires energy to keep things organized in some fashion. As an example, it requires energy for the atoms that make up your computer (or you, for that matter) require energy to stick together to form the computer. Without that energy, all of those atoms would be randomly spread throughout the universe. In a state of complete entropy, the entire universe would be made up of evenly distributed matter and energy, with nothing binding together to form anything.
That's a big topic, as you can imagine, but I'm not really concerned with that right now. I'm thinking about the school band concert. My understanding is that the purpose of a band is to play together in some arrangement in order to create music for an audience. Most of the time I simply take this for granted, but when at a school band concert, especially something called a symphonic band, which is like an orchestra with no stringed instruments except bass and lots of wind instruments, I've noticed that it takes considerable work on the part of the audience to discern music within the sounds coming from the stage.
I have a pretty discerning ear, and it almost physically hurts me when music is out of tune or tempo (or both). So one of the ways I protect myself during these concerts is to get into a meditative state where I block out the idea that it's music coming fro the stage and receive it as a conglomeration of random sounds instead, a state of musical entropy.
From that state, it becomes kind of a game called "Find the Music," where I close my eyes and try to find the music amidst the random noise in the room. This is kind of like when you leave a quarter in your pants pocket when you wash them, and then it comes loose and bangs around in the dryer. I have been in laundromats where I've need people tapping their feet to the rhythm of the quarter. It's kind of like that, except with saxophones, flutes, clarinets, french horns and trombones instead of quarters.
I know it sounds weird, but for me at least, this is really fun. It's almost calming to listen to a sustained level of noise, and then every once in a while I can discern a melody or a beat. It's strangely satisfying to find the music in the noise, the order in the entropy. So here I sit at intermission, waiting for the next game to start.
That's a big topic, as you can imagine, but I'm not really concerned with that right now. I'm thinking about the school band concert. My understanding is that the purpose of a band is to play together in some arrangement in order to create music for an audience. Most of the time I simply take this for granted, but when at a school band concert, especially something called a symphonic band, which is like an orchestra with no stringed instruments except bass and lots of wind instruments, I've noticed that it takes considerable work on the part of the audience to discern music within the sounds coming from the stage.
I have a pretty discerning ear, and it almost physically hurts me when music is out of tune or tempo (or both). So one of the ways I protect myself during these concerts is to get into a meditative state where I block out the idea that it's music coming fro the stage and receive it as a conglomeration of random sounds instead, a state of musical entropy.
From that state, it becomes kind of a game called "Find the Music," where I close my eyes and try to find the music amidst the random noise in the room. This is kind of like when you leave a quarter in your pants pocket when you wash them, and then it comes loose and bangs around in the dryer. I have been in laundromats where I've need people tapping their feet to the rhythm of the quarter. It's kind of like that, except with saxophones, flutes, clarinets, french horns and trombones instead of quarters.
I know it sounds weird, but for me at least, this is really fun. It's almost calming to listen to a sustained level of noise, and then every once in a while I can discern a melody or a beat. It's strangely satisfying to find the music in the noise, the order in the entropy. So here I sit at intermission, waiting for the next game to start.
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Science
What is it about holiday shopping that makes people insane? Is it just that the words Christmas and Crazy come from the same Latin root? By the middle of December I want to be a shut-in, because I can't go anywhere or do anything without somebody driving crazily or walking too quickly and not noticing that they're pushing. It seems like the speed:attention ratio is just off. My current operating theory is that this temporary unhinged behavior is caused by incessant Christmas music. I call it ICM Syndrome, and its symptoms include vacant stares, anxiousness, and incessant humming.
Although there have been lots of sociological (and therefore meaningless) studies on holiday behavior, there hasn't been a lot of rigorous research done on the physiological effects. What I've read proves only that there is a moderate but noticeable shift of brain activity from the cerebral cortex and its logical thinking to the amygdalae, otherwise known as the "lizard brain" once people have been exposed to "Winter Wonderland" or "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" 10 or more times within a 4 day period. Over time, this can lead to enlargement of those lobes, possibly crowding out the logical thought centers. An extended study is needed to see if the damage is reversible.
This would be bad enough if I hadn't had the Hallelujah Chorus stuck in my head for the last week. I need a vacation.
Friday, December 02, 2011
One of the challenges of growing up is to progress from the me me me-ness of two and three-year-olds to something more nuanced as an adult. This can manifest itself in a number of ways, depending on your intelligence, your neediness, and the degree to which you are a shades-of-gray person or a black-and-white person.
You can dig into this as much as you want, but I think when it really comes down to is how much can you get over yourself. If you're someone like me who has and unnaturally high opinion of himself this can be quite a challenge, but the thing that makes it possible for me is that I have no trouble distinguishing between what is appropriate when I'm by myself versus when I'm interacting with another person.
What tends to impede getting over yourself is people's natural tendency to want to win. This is a primal urge and difficult to combat, and often manifests itself in the need to get the last word or to be RIGHT. This is typically not a useful urge. The core problem is that everyone wants to get the last word in and everyone thinks they're right. Otherwise, why bother? So going into a discussion sure of your rightness is a recipe for disaster, or at least for nastiness, and being insistent on that point only raises the stakes.
I'll get to a broader discussion of this in a moment, but I think it's best illustrated by and example, and I'll use my current job because it's unique in ways yet generalizable.
The teacher-student relationship is one with a clear authority figure. As the teacher, I have ultimate say in pretty much everything that goes into the functioning of the class. This allows me to say "because I said so, that's why" or perhaps something slightly more mature-sounding. In fact, it compels me to do so, because if I don't there's chaos. What the authority position does not do, however, is make me right. The only thing that makes me right is being right, and what's right isn't always clear. It just allows me to say, "I understand what you're saying, but the discussion's over." Of course that only works if I can refrain from saying anything else, but since I don't actually like to talk that's not too hard.
Getting back to the larger topic, I think the key to getting over yourself is listening. I've gone off before about how I think good listening is a skill that we really ought to spend more time teaching and developing, and what's needed here is two kinds of listening. First, you need to really listen to what the other person is saying an evaluate it on its own merits, not filtered through your own feelings. Second, you need to listen to yourself and get an idea of how you are sounding to others. It's all part of looking outside yourself.
In advertising there are two-plus questions that must be answered right off the bat. What am I trying to accomplish, and who am I talking to and what do they want? I am not in school to talk about math for math's sake or for my own. I am there to fulfill the needs of my students and their parents. Doing this effectively requires understanding what they want and how they expect to get it. That doesn't mean you have to do everything they want or the way they want it. What is does mean that it's not all about you and you must consider how what you do will be received.
This is very easy to say but can be very difficult to do, and it means being able to live without being right all time, but I can tell you from experience growing up as the "smart kid," being right isn't all it's cracked up to be.
You can dig into this as much as you want, but I think when it really comes down to is how much can you get over yourself. If you're someone like me who has and unnaturally high opinion of himself this can be quite a challenge, but the thing that makes it possible for me is that I have no trouble distinguishing between what is appropriate when I'm by myself versus when I'm interacting with another person.
What tends to impede getting over yourself is people's natural tendency to want to win. This is a primal urge and difficult to combat, and often manifests itself in the need to get the last word or to be RIGHT. This is typically not a useful urge. The core problem is that everyone wants to get the last word in and everyone thinks they're right. Otherwise, why bother? So going into a discussion sure of your rightness is a recipe for disaster, or at least for nastiness, and being insistent on that point only raises the stakes.
I'll get to a broader discussion of this in a moment, but I think it's best illustrated by and example, and I'll use my current job because it's unique in ways yet generalizable.
The teacher-student relationship is one with a clear authority figure. As the teacher, I have ultimate say in pretty much everything that goes into the functioning of the class. This allows me to say "because I said so, that's why" or perhaps something slightly more mature-sounding. In fact, it compels me to do so, because if I don't there's chaos. What the authority position does not do, however, is make me right. The only thing that makes me right is being right, and what's right isn't always clear. It just allows me to say, "I understand what you're saying, but the discussion's over." Of course that only works if I can refrain from saying anything else, but since I don't actually like to talk that's not too hard.
Getting back to the larger topic, I think the key to getting over yourself is listening. I've gone off before about how I think good listening is a skill that we really ought to spend more time teaching and developing, and what's needed here is two kinds of listening. First, you need to really listen to what the other person is saying an evaluate it on its own merits, not filtered through your own feelings. Second, you need to listen to yourself and get an idea of how you are sounding to others. It's all part of looking outside yourself.
In advertising there are two-plus questions that must be answered right off the bat. What am I trying to accomplish, and who am I talking to and what do they want? I am not in school to talk about math for math's sake or for my own. I am there to fulfill the needs of my students and their parents. Doing this effectively requires understanding what they want and how they expect to get it. That doesn't mean you have to do everything they want or the way they want it. What is does mean that it's not all about you and you must consider how what you do will be received.
This is very easy to say but can be very difficult to do, and it means being able to live without being right all time, but I can tell you from experience growing up as the "smart kid," being right isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
Getting the Boot
Long before Punk'd, there was a show called Candid Camera that was on TV for close to 20 years. The would lure people into odd situations and capture how they'd react (one of my favorites, they removed the engine from a car and rolled it down a hill where there was a repair shop at the bottom. The young female driver gets out and tells the mechanic that her car stalled and now won't start. He opens the hood and sees there's no engine and is amusing perplexed). I remember seeing one episode where they gave a bunch of honor students what they called a career suitability survey and then met with them individually. The student would sit at a desk across from the counselor, who would say very seriously that their carrer survey pointed very strongly toward a career as, for example, a manual laborer, dishwasher, or shepherd. The students were of course appalled.
In this spirit, I approach tonight's Class of 2013 College Kick-Off night at an area independent school. This is somewhere between exciting and terrifying for most of the people here, especially those who have a first kid going through this.
I come to this as both a second-timer and someone with fairly strong opinions along the lines of the college process being almost comically overblown. I say almost, because the stress level that goes along with the college process is anything but comical. It's difficult and occasionally heartbreaking. And of course, like most of the stuff that's wrong with life these days, it's the fault of us baby boomer parents. That being said, the kids are very invested in it and we as parents, having created this monster in the first place, must now feed the beast.
The college counselors at this school seem pretty high powered and knowledgeable. They are very earnest. They talk about how you should try to make it fun. As one of them said, "Enjoy the journey to find where your kids will spend the next 4 years," (unsaid: "before they move back home again").
The whole part about standardized testing makes me cringe. The whole process has become perverted, IMHO, though I'm at a loss to see what an alternative would be.
An interesting factoid is the huge increase in the number of applications at every college. I'm guessing this is because of a synergistic combination of boomer parent pushiness and improved technology. Since many boomers either want nothing but the best for their kids, are living vicariously through their kids, or both, they will do nothing to limit the search. The combination between the development of the Common Application, the ability to apply to a virtually limitless universe entirely online, and free access to a credit card leads to a rising number of applications per person.
Another interesting factoid is how much colleges pay the College Board for each student's name to send them mailers. What would you guess? It's 30 cents. As the counselor said, "So you know you have value."
In this spirit, I approach tonight's Class of 2013 College Kick-Off night at an area independent school. This is somewhere between exciting and terrifying for most of the people here, especially those who have a first kid going through this.
I come to this as both a second-timer and someone with fairly strong opinions along the lines of the college process being almost comically overblown. I say almost, because the stress level that goes along with the college process is anything but comical. It's difficult and occasionally heartbreaking. And of course, like most of the stuff that's wrong with life these days, it's the fault of us baby boomer parents. That being said, the kids are very invested in it and we as parents, having created this monster in the first place, must now feed the beast.
The college counselors at this school seem pretty high powered and knowledgeable. They are very earnest. They talk about how you should try to make it fun. As one of them said, "Enjoy the journey to find where your kids will spend the next 4 years," (unsaid: "before they move back home again").
The whole part about standardized testing makes me cringe. The whole process has become perverted, IMHO, though I'm at a loss to see what an alternative would be.
An interesting factoid is the huge increase in the number of applications at every college. I'm guessing this is because of a synergistic combination of boomer parent pushiness and improved technology. Since many boomers either want nothing but the best for their kids, are living vicariously through their kids, or both, they will do nothing to limit the search. The combination between the development of the Common Application, the ability to apply to a virtually limitless universe entirely online, and free access to a credit card leads to a rising number of applications per person.
Another interesting factoid is how much colleges pay the College Board for each student's name to send them mailers. What would you guess? It's 30 cents. As the counselor said, "So you know you have value."
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Meetings make me think weird stuff
One of the things we talked about in a meeting today was about people being guided by their relationship with the divine. Not that there's anything wrong with that, this being a religious school, but given the history of civilization, it seems like the type of issue that is unlikely to be workable when you are talking about about a group of more than, well, one.
A big question in this debate is, how do you incorporate atheists into this discussion? What is an atheist's relationship to the divine? I'm not exactly an atheist, but I'm not a true believer either. So what's my relationship with the divine?
I am embarrassed to admit that the best encapsulation of my religious belief is what they call The Force in Star Wars. I'm not talking about "May the Force be with you," which is just a pseudo-mystical way of saying "Have a nice day." I'm talking about the way the Force is initially described, as an energy field created by all living things, that surrounds and penetrates living beings and binds the galaxy together. George Lucas said he got the idea of the Force from another futuristic film, where it was roughly equated with God.
So it appears that I have a relationship with a roughly equated with the divine-like thing, I suppose, and I daresay that that goes for many of us who don't think of God as an old man in the sky. What's important in the original statement is being guided by that relationship, not the relationship itself. I guess that's kind of what I do, given that I try to live by a simple moral code. Since that code (and moral codes in general) revolves around my relationships with other people, rather than the divine, I can honestly say that I am guided by a sense of being part of something bigger, something that exists only because we will it to exist as living creatures.
Yes, I am aware that this makes only partial sense. I'm not very good at that spiritual philosophical logical argument construction stuff. What I am better at though is treating people the way I'd want to be treated, and trying to leave each situation I encounter better than I found it. And I can settle for that.
A big question in this debate is, how do you incorporate atheists into this discussion? What is an atheist's relationship to the divine? I'm not exactly an atheist, but I'm not a true believer either. So what's my relationship with the divine?
I am embarrassed to admit that the best encapsulation of my religious belief is what they call The Force in Star Wars. I'm not talking about "May the Force be with you," which is just a pseudo-mystical way of saying "Have a nice day." I'm talking about the way the Force is initially described, as an energy field created by all living things, that surrounds and penetrates living beings and binds the galaxy together. George Lucas said he got the idea of the Force from another futuristic film, where it was roughly equated with God.
So it appears that I have a relationship with a roughly equated with the divine-like thing, I suppose, and I daresay that that goes for many of us who don't think of God as an old man in the sky. What's important in the original statement is being guided by that relationship, not the relationship itself. I guess that's kind of what I do, given that I try to live by a simple moral code. Since that code (and moral codes in general) revolves around my relationships with other people, rather than the divine, I can honestly say that I am guided by a sense of being part of something bigger, something that exists only because we will it to exist as living creatures.
Yes, I am aware that this makes only partial sense. I'm not very good at that spiritual philosophical logical argument construction stuff. What I am better at though is treating people the way I'd want to be treated, and trying to leave each situation I encounter better than I found it. And I can settle for that.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Choir attire
We're a pretty musical family. My kids especially like to sing, and one has been bugging us for years to allow her to join a local group. And this year, now that she can drive herself to rehearsals, we've allowed her to join. She's very happy doing this and the choir is really good, and we knew there would be some level of parent involvement, but we were completely unprepared for the cultlike aspects of being a part of this.
I should have known it would be like that when I saw that they referred to the girls as "choristers." I understand that this is an actual word, but it isn't one I'd encountered in the first 55 332/365 years of my life. The first thing that started were the e-mails. They come, several times a week, with details of concerts and everything about he concerts. Then came the uniforms. Then the calendar, then a series of calendar updates, modifications and clarifications. And then the meetings (I am currently sitting in what could be called either a double meeting or one long meeting, which started at 10:30 and runs through 12:15 on Saturday morning(!)). You learn that being the parent of a chorister is a state of mind, requiring an orientation that choir is, if not the only thing, certainly the vital center of the kid's life.
Now we're in the midst of fundraising hell. Obviously, an organization needs money, so we're going from one fundraiser to the next. My favorite so far is the cookies. Somebody knows about this bakery in another city that makes cookies. They are vanilla cookies with a big gob of chocolate icing on them. The number of announcements and amount of meeting time spent on these cookies is astounding. A few weeks ago I went to (somewhat shorter) back-to-back meetings, first for the whole group, then for my kid's particular group, and then another 3 days later. There were announcements about the cookies at all 3 meetings, and it was actually scary how scripted the announcements sounded. I know that, aside from being indescribably delicious (the woman sitting next to me did not agree), the cookies "make wonderful hostess gifts" and that they "freeze wonderfully." These exact phrases also appear in multiple follow-up e-mails. I can just see the glassy eyed choristers, traipsing from neighbor to neighbor, endlessly muttering "Make. Wonderful. Hostess. Gifts. Freeze. Wonderfully."
An afternote- the cookies arrived today. They look like vanilla cookies with a lot of chocolate icing on them, come in cellophane packages with printed labels on them like supermarket cookies, and would make (based on my non-WASP limited comprehension of the phrase), completely uninspiring hostess gifts. I have no doubt that they freeze wonderfully.
I should have known it would be like that when I saw that they referred to the girls as "choristers." I understand that this is an actual word, but it isn't one I'd encountered in the first 55 332/365 years of my life. The first thing that started were the e-mails. They come, several times a week, with details of concerts and everything about he concerts. Then came the uniforms. Then the calendar, then a series of calendar updates, modifications and clarifications. And then the meetings (I am currently sitting in what could be called either a double meeting or one long meeting, which started at 10:30 and runs through 12:15 on Saturday morning(!)). You learn that being the parent of a chorister is a state of mind, requiring an orientation that choir is, if not the only thing, certainly the vital center of the kid's life.
Now we're in the midst of fundraising hell. Obviously, an organization needs money, so we're going from one fundraiser to the next. My favorite so far is the cookies. Somebody knows about this bakery in another city that makes cookies. They are vanilla cookies with a big gob of chocolate icing on them. The number of announcements and amount of meeting time spent on these cookies is astounding. A few weeks ago I went to (somewhat shorter) back-to-back meetings, first for the whole group, then for my kid's particular group, and then another 3 days later. There were announcements about the cookies at all 3 meetings, and it was actually scary how scripted the announcements sounded. I know that, aside from being indescribably delicious (the woman sitting next to me did not agree), the cookies "make wonderful hostess gifts" and that they "freeze wonderfully." These exact phrases also appear in multiple follow-up e-mails. I can just see the glassy eyed choristers, traipsing from neighbor to neighbor, endlessly muttering "Make. Wonderful. Hostess. Gifts. Freeze. Wonderfully."
An afternote- the cookies arrived today. They look like vanilla cookies with a lot of chocolate icing on them, come in cellophane packages with printed labels on them like supermarket cookies, and would make (based on my non-WASP limited comprehension of the phrase), completely uninspiring hostess gifts. I have no doubt that they freeze wonderfully.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Shmollege
I wrote this a couple of years ago for a class I was taking and think I posted it here at the time, but it seems apropos at the moment.
All over my neighborhood, city, state, country, and as far as I know, the world, there are soon-to-be-graduating high school students in a state of high anxiety, agonizing over a monumental decision. Where do I go to college next year? And of course, it's not just the students. It's their parents, friends, relatives and school guidance departments poring over facts and figures and planning visits to faraway lands (okay, I'm exaggerating- let's say rural Maine) in the search for the Right Choice. Hours of thought and thousands of dollars, all spent on the first important decision many teenagers make.
Selecting a college seems like a huge decision for a young person. After all, it's what they're going to be doing and where they're going to be for the next four years and possibly more. It's their first experience away from home, living somewhat independently, meeting new people and exploring new horizons, growing in ways nobody can imagine. For many people, it's the first time they get to choose their own path. It's the Biggest Decision Of Their Life.
Or not. Maybe it's the least important decision of their life. But how could that be? Think of it this way; the consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Nobody can predict the ultimate results of college choice for any given person with any degree of accuracy. It's weird to think that you make this huge, exhaustively researched decision and you'll probably never know if you made the right choice. But it flows directly from the old nature versus nurture question that child psychologists argue endlessly over.
Nobody knows for sure how much of what a person turns out to be is dependent on the individual's genetic makeup and how much comes from their environment. And if we don't know that, given the wide range of parenting styles and home situations, how are you going to glean a difference from a bunch of fundamentally similar institutions? Does it matter if you go to Middlebury versus Bowdoin, Bates, Skidmore, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Kenyon, Carleton or Haverford? Even comparing any of those places to "dissimilar" types of colleges like Ohio State, or the Universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas or Florida, could you possibly prove to me that a person's life will be fundamentally better, or even different, if they chose one versus the other?
If there are no knowable consequences to making a decision, what kind of decision is that? If you're making the choice based on its outcome, on what basis are you going to evaluate it? You simply can't, at least not in any rational kind of way. If you talk to college students, my experience is that almost everyone likes where they're going to school, whether it was their original first choice or not.
So then is it any more important than deciding what color shirt to wear today? I'm not saying that college itself is inconsequential; college is a terrific experience for most people. And I understand that there are situations, like financial considerations or ultra specialized programs, where a particular choice matters. But I'd argue that these are a small minority and in most cases the opposite is true.
I feel like my own college choice was pretty much a disaster, and my life turned out pretty good in spite of it. Was I miserable for most of the 4 years? Absolutely. Not only did I choose the "wrong college," I chose a bad major as well. I majored in psychology for a ridiculously adolescent, child of the 60's kind of reason- to "find myself." And like all my friends who tried the same thing, I failed to do so and was profoundly disappointed with psychology as a way to understand one's self.
So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? Maybe I would have been just as miserable and immature somewhere else and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Other big decisions, like finding a job, getting married, buying a house or having kids, give you frequent and very specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.
However, I now look back on my professional life and find that it's been centered around advertising and teaching, two of the most psychology-oriented fields there are. And though it would be hard to find a direct path from my college self to the present, I've maintained some core personal principles and beliefs throughout, and that, I'd argue is the most important thing. Not where I chose to spend the supposedly last 4 years of my adolescence.
All over my neighborhood, city, state, country, and as far as I know, the world, there are soon-to-be-graduating high school students in a state of high anxiety, agonizing over a monumental decision. Where do I go to college next year? And of course, it's not just the students. It's their parents, friends, relatives and school guidance departments poring over facts and figures and planning visits to faraway lands (okay, I'm exaggerating- let's say rural Maine) in the search for the Right Choice. Hours of thought and thousands of dollars, all spent on the first important decision many teenagers make.
Selecting a college seems like a huge decision for a young person. After all, it's what they're going to be doing and where they're going to be for the next four years and possibly more. It's their first experience away from home, living somewhat independently, meeting new people and exploring new horizons, growing in ways nobody can imagine. For many people, it's the first time they get to choose their own path. It's the Biggest Decision Of Their Life.
Or not. Maybe it's the least important decision of their life. But how could that be? Think of it this way; the consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Nobody can predict the ultimate results of college choice for any given person with any degree of accuracy. It's weird to think that you make this huge, exhaustively researched decision and you'll probably never know if you made the right choice. But it flows directly from the old nature versus nurture question that child psychologists argue endlessly over.
Nobody knows for sure how much of what a person turns out to be is dependent on the individual's genetic makeup and how much comes from their environment. And if we don't know that, given the wide range of parenting styles and home situations, how are you going to glean a difference from a bunch of fundamentally similar institutions? Does it matter if you go to Middlebury versus Bowdoin, Bates, Skidmore, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Kenyon, Carleton or Haverford? Even comparing any of those places to "dissimilar" types of colleges like Ohio State, or the Universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas or Florida, could you possibly prove to me that a person's life will be fundamentally better, or even different, if they chose one versus the other?
If there are no knowable consequences to making a decision, what kind of decision is that? If you're making the choice based on its outcome, on what basis are you going to evaluate it? You simply can't, at least not in any rational kind of way. If you talk to college students, my experience is that almost everyone likes where they're going to school, whether it was their original first choice or not.
So then is it any more important than deciding what color shirt to wear today? I'm not saying that college itself is inconsequential; college is a terrific experience for most people. And I understand that there are situations, like financial considerations or ultra specialized programs, where a particular choice matters. But I'd argue that these are a small minority and in most cases the opposite is true.
I feel like my own college choice was pretty much a disaster, and my life turned out pretty good in spite of it. Was I miserable for most of the 4 years? Absolutely. Not only did I choose the "wrong college," I chose a bad major as well. I majored in psychology for a ridiculously adolescent, child of the 60's kind of reason- to "find myself." And like all my friends who tried the same thing, I failed to do so and was profoundly disappointed with psychology as a way to understand one's self.
So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? Maybe I would have been just as miserable and immature somewhere else and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Other big decisions, like finding a job, getting married, buying a house or having kids, give you frequent and very specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.
However, I now look back on my professional life and find that it's been centered around advertising and teaching, two of the most psychology-oriented fields there are. And though it would be hard to find a direct path from my college self to the present, I've maintained some core personal principles and beliefs throughout, and that, I'd argue is the most important thing. Not where I chose to spend the supposedly last 4 years of my adolescence.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Testing, 1 2 3
People around here hate and fear tests. I never hated tests when I was in school. I mean, I didn't like them or anything, but tests have the wonderful characteristic of finality. They're done when they are over, completely out of your control. This distinguishes them from papers, which are never done until you actually write them, and so I constructed my college course load around courses that had final tests rather than papers. (It should be noted that I got through my 4 years of college without turning a single paper in on time, so perhaps I'm not the best judge of the advisability of these things).
Thinking back on it, this really doesn't reflect well on my outlook at the time. Of course, I was 18, so to even refer to myself as having an outlook is probably giving myself too much credit. But what I mean is that I preferred to depend on outside influences to guide my life, rather than trying to guide it myself. This ultimately led to my college graduation being like the final scene in The Candidate, where Robert Redford, originally selected to run for office because they couldn't find anybody legit to run against and opponent who seemed unbeatable, actually wins the election. He's sitting in the back of a limo with his advisors, with his supporters roaring approval outside and he looks at his manager with a stricken look on his face and says, "Now what do I do?" Except it's so noisy the guy can't hear him, so he mouths the question again, "Now what do I do?" And that's how the movie ends. I still remember that lost feeling in the movie and my graduation.
I'm not sure that's the way you want your life to go necessarily. You can take a pretty winding path to get to where you want to go, as I did. But on the other hand, there's something wonderful about taking each day, each moment, as its own, without imposing some kind of structure on it. There's a great passage in one of the Pooh books (I was thinking of Pooh because, having mentioned that I'd once answered the question "Who would you want to play you in the movie of your life?" with Bugs Bunny, someone asked me today which Winnie the Pooh character I thought I was most like), where Piglet asks Pooh, "What's the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning?" Pooh replies, "I think, what's for breakfast?" Piglet then says "I think, what exciting thing will happen to me today?" Pooh thinks for a moment and says simply, "It's the same thing."
It's one thing to embrace the moment. I understand that it's another thing entirely to embrace taking a test. And adolescents have a tendency to magnify the importance of these assessment points, none of which really make even a miniscule difference in the way the rest of their lives will unfold. However, the test will come and go, and you will still be here and you will still be the same person. If that's not reassuring in some fundamental way, you might reexamine the way you're approaching your life.
And, by the way, I don't think I ever saw myself in any of the Pooh characters, which is okay by me since I don't think the actual Christopher Robin (Milne) saw very much of himself in them either. I have, however, seen Christopher Robin's own stuffed animals, which were, and may still be, on display in a glass case in the children's section of a nondescript midtown Manhattan library. They look very much like the drawings in the books.
Thinking back on it, this really doesn't reflect well on my outlook at the time. Of course, I was 18, so to even refer to myself as having an outlook is probably giving myself too much credit. But what I mean is that I preferred to depend on outside influences to guide my life, rather than trying to guide it myself. This ultimately led to my college graduation being like the final scene in The Candidate, where Robert Redford, originally selected to run for office because they couldn't find anybody legit to run against and opponent who seemed unbeatable, actually wins the election. He's sitting in the back of a limo with his advisors, with his supporters roaring approval outside and he looks at his manager with a stricken look on his face and says, "Now what do I do?" Except it's so noisy the guy can't hear him, so he mouths the question again, "Now what do I do?" And that's how the movie ends. I still remember that lost feeling in the movie and my graduation.
I'm not sure that's the way you want your life to go necessarily. You can take a pretty winding path to get to where you want to go, as I did. But on the other hand, there's something wonderful about taking each day, each moment, as its own, without imposing some kind of structure on it. There's a great passage in one of the Pooh books (I was thinking of Pooh because, having mentioned that I'd once answered the question "Who would you want to play you in the movie of your life?" with Bugs Bunny, someone asked me today which Winnie the Pooh character I thought I was most like), where Piglet asks Pooh, "What's the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning?" Pooh replies, "I think, what's for breakfast?" Piglet then says "I think, what exciting thing will happen to me today?" Pooh thinks for a moment and says simply, "It's the same thing."
It's one thing to embrace the moment. I understand that it's another thing entirely to embrace taking a test. And adolescents have a tendency to magnify the importance of these assessment points, none of which really make even a miniscule difference in the way the rest of their lives will unfold. However, the test will come and go, and you will still be here and you will still be the same person. If that's not reassuring in some fundamental way, you might reexamine the way you're approaching your life.
And, by the way, I don't think I ever saw myself in any of the Pooh characters, which is okay by me since I don't think the actual Christopher Robin (Milne) saw very much of himself in them either. I have, however, seen Christopher Robin's own stuffed animals, which were, and may still be, on display in a glass case in the children's section of a nondescript midtown Manhattan library. They look very much like the drawings in the books.
Check this out
This amazing video was shot from the International Space Station.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Here’s a list of the shooting locations, in order of appearance:
1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night
Friday, November 11, 2011
Phoneyness
How much to you think a new iPhone costs? Let's say 32 gb, the middle level. $299, right? Wrong! A 32gb iPhone 4S costs $749. You can get one for $299 from your cell phone provider, but only in exchange for your signing a 2 year contract, obligating you to a monthly service fee which ranges, depending on your service level, from $70 to around $250 per month.
In other words, the cell phone companies make so much money off your monthly service fee that they consider it smart to discount your phone by $450. That's nearly $40 per mont over the 2 years.
So-called loss leaders are nothing new. A big discount on a popular item or two to lure people into a store? Classic retail sales technique. The first company to make big money off selling equipment for less than cost was Polaroid, which is no longer around.
Polaroid made the first instant cameras. Most cameras took pictures on film that had to be carried or mailed to a processing lab for developing and printing. This took anywhere from a few hours to several days. But a guy named Edwin Land invented a camera whose film contained its own developing chemicals, allowing pictures to appear within a minute or so. This was a one-of-a-kind thing and amazing, but expensive. But because Land and his company Polaroid made both the cameras and the film, they hit on the idea of selling the camera for less than what it cost to make and then making their money off the film. So lots of little profits instead of one big one.
Polaroid's out of business because digital camera technology made it obsolete, but they were very profitable for a long time. The most prevalent example of this strategy today is ink-jet printers. The printers themselves are sold at a price below cost, and the money is made on the ink. That's why they tell you not to refill the cartridges.
Cell phone subsidies, as they're called, are a similar tactic and here's how absurd it gets. Someone in my family has a phone that's a lemon. It's never worked right, the battery dies quickly, it's lousy. But it's not due for upgrade until next March and we just can't live with it anymore. So I went to the Verizon web site and saw that the phone cost $749 and was not pleased. So today I went to the Verizon store and I learned something. It's cheaper to get a whole new phone line and pay for 2 years of service with the discounted phone than it is to just buy the damned phone. Not just cheaper, more than $200 cheaper. How about that?
So now I have an extra phone line, which I don't even know the number for. It just seems wrong. What if someone calls? Should I pick up?
In other words, the cell phone companies make so much money off your monthly service fee that they consider it smart to discount your phone by $450. That's nearly $40 per mont over the 2 years.
So-called loss leaders are nothing new. A big discount on a popular item or two to lure people into a store? Classic retail sales technique. The first company to make big money off selling equipment for less than cost was Polaroid, which is no longer around.
Polaroid made the first instant cameras. Most cameras took pictures on film that had to be carried or mailed to a processing lab for developing and printing. This took anywhere from a few hours to several days. But a guy named Edwin Land invented a camera whose film contained its own developing chemicals, allowing pictures to appear within a minute or so. This was a one-of-a-kind thing and amazing, but expensive. But because Land and his company Polaroid made both the cameras and the film, they hit on the idea of selling the camera for less than what it cost to make and then making their money off the film. So lots of little profits instead of one big one.
Polaroid's out of business because digital camera technology made it obsolete, but they were very profitable for a long time. The most prevalent example of this strategy today is ink-jet printers. The printers themselves are sold at a price below cost, and the money is made on the ink. That's why they tell you not to refill the cartridges.
Cell phone subsidies, as they're called, are a similar tactic and here's how absurd it gets. Someone in my family has a phone that's a lemon. It's never worked right, the battery dies quickly, it's lousy. But it's not due for upgrade until next March and we just can't live with it anymore. So I went to the Verizon web site and saw that the phone cost $749 and was not pleased. So today I went to the Verizon store and I learned something. It's cheaper to get a whole new phone line and pay for 2 years of service with the discounted phone than it is to just buy the damned phone. Not just cheaper, more than $200 cheaper. How about that?
So now I have an extra phone line, which I don't even know the number for. It just seems wrong. What if someone calls? Should I pick up?
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
I'm guessing you can drive yourself crazy
After taking a peek at the election results so far, I have only one question. Can anyone explain to me why, in Montgomery County, is the Republican candidate for Recorder of Deeds is leading by 2000 votes while the Democratic candidate for Register of Wills is leading by an almost identical margin? Who is splitting their votes like that?
Oh, and what it a prothonotary? Bad enough I'm voting for candidates I know next to nothing about without having to vote for an office that I don't know what it is. It's some kind of notary? Like the guy at the Mailroom USA who verifies documents and puts an official-looking stamp on them?
Oh, and what it a prothonotary? Bad enough I'm voting for candidates I know next to nothing about without having to vote for an office that I don't know what it is. It's some kind of notary? Like the guy at the Mailroom USA who verifies documents and puts an official-looking stamp on them?
Football game
I went to my first Eagles game yesterday. It has been many years since I've been to a pro football game (to give you an idea, it was an LA Rams game) and I was pretty excited about it. As most of you know, I attend many baseball games, so my impressions will be refracted through the lens of my baseball experiences.
My daughter and I arrived at Lincoln Financial Field around half an hour before game time. As we walked toward the field, we saw the streams of people approaching the gate coalesce into a mass surrounded by chain link fence. This was the frisky mass, where you approach the frisking stations. To give you an idea of the atmosphere here, just imagine that you're at the airport and about 70,000 people are getting on a plane at once and they all approach security in a big crowd instead of a line. On the good side, nobody's got luggage and you don't have to take off your shoes, on the bad side, almost everyone is drunk and carrying a can or bottle of beer, which is tossed to the ground right before the frisking commences.
Frisking is done by gender, with females funneled into two lines and males into the other dozen. This causes a tremendous bottleneck as women struggle to get to their assigned line and then the men go through and wait. The frisking itself was thorough without being invasive and nobody got abusive.
Once through, we entered the stadium. Almost immediately, I felt a vibe of drunken male aggressiveness and rah-rah-ness that I didn't exactly find pleasant. The first order of business was to find a cash machine. I had inadvertently come with just barely enough cash to pay for parking (just barely meaning I need to pay $3 of the $25(!) in quarters). Since this is a Financial Field I figured that getting money would be no problem. However, the Lincoln Financial rep that I asked had no idea where the ATM was located. Fortunately, there was an ATM right next to the beer stand and fortunately there was a beer stand right next to the ATM.
There are, in fact, a massive number of beer stands in the stadium, which is good because the food choices are, to put it kindly, inadequate. When I was in Florida Spring Training in dinky little ballparks, the only thing you could get to eat if you didn't want beef was pizza. Same thing here, save for one stand that had fried chicken filets. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the wide variety of choices at Citizens Bank or any of the newer baseball parks. Or maybe the food choices just suck.
The stadium is a good place to watch football. The game was okay, I guess. I'm not a huge football fan, and the only real attraction for me is the occasional amazing athletic feat that the Eagles are capable of. But this game was completely devoid of spectacle. It was close and somewhat exciting as a result, but nothing very interesting happened. By the fourth quarter, the fans around us were more engaged in arguing with the fans of the opponent sprinkled through the section than in the game itself. The best part, and I have to admit that it is a very wonderful part, is the singing of "Fly Eagles Fly" after every touchdown. I've not experienced a lot of fight song and this is a good fight song. I also very much enjoyed watching the remote controlled camera fly over and around the field.
As we were leaving, the guy behind me on the stairs kept pushing up against me, as if that would make me somehow move faster than the person in front of me. And there it struck me what was bothering me the whole time. I somehow knew that if I pushed back, or turned and said something, that I was going to get the crap beaten out of me. As we passed back through the chain link fence on the way out, I thought it'd be a while before I did this again.
My daughter and I arrived at Lincoln Financial Field around half an hour before game time. As we walked toward the field, we saw the streams of people approaching the gate coalesce into a mass surrounded by chain link fence. This was the frisky mass, where you approach the frisking stations. To give you an idea of the atmosphere here, just imagine that you're at the airport and about 70,000 people are getting on a plane at once and they all approach security in a big crowd instead of a line. On the good side, nobody's got luggage and you don't have to take off your shoes, on the bad side, almost everyone is drunk and carrying a can or bottle of beer, which is tossed to the ground right before the frisking commences.
Frisking is done by gender, with females funneled into two lines and males into the other dozen. This causes a tremendous bottleneck as women struggle to get to their assigned line and then the men go through and wait. The frisking itself was thorough without being invasive and nobody got abusive.
Once through, we entered the stadium. Almost immediately, I felt a vibe of drunken male aggressiveness and rah-rah-ness that I didn't exactly find pleasant. The first order of business was to find a cash machine. I had inadvertently come with just barely enough cash to pay for parking (just barely meaning I need to pay $3 of the $25(!) in quarters). Since this is a Financial Field I figured that getting money would be no problem. However, the Lincoln Financial rep that I asked had no idea where the ATM was located. Fortunately, there was an ATM right next to the beer stand and fortunately there was a beer stand right next to the ATM.
There are, in fact, a massive number of beer stands in the stadium, which is good because the food choices are, to put it kindly, inadequate. When I was in Florida Spring Training in dinky little ballparks, the only thing you could get to eat if you didn't want beef was pizza. Same thing here, save for one stand that had fried chicken filets. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the wide variety of choices at Citizens Bank or any of the newer baseball parks. Or maybe the food choices just suck.
The stadium is a good place to watch football. The game was okay, I guess. I'm not a huge football fan, and the only real attraction for me is the occasional amazing athletic feat that the Eagles are capable of. But this game was completely devoid of spectacle. It was close and somewhat exciting as a result, but nothing very interesting happened. By the fourth quarter, the fans around us were more engaged in arguing with the fans of the opponent sprinkled through the section than in the game itself. The best part, and I have to admit that it is a very wonderful part, is the singing of "Fly Eagles Fly" after every touchdown. I've not experienced a lot of fight song and this is a good fight song. I also very much enjoyed watching the remote controlled camera fly over and around the field.
As we were leaving, the guy behind me on the stairs kept pushing up against me, as if that would make me somehow move faster than the person in front of me. And there it struck me what was bothering me the whole time. I somehow knew that if I pushed back, or turned and said something, that I was going to get the crap beaten out of me. As we passed back through the chain link fence on the way out, I thought it'd be a while before I did this again.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Going nowhere fast
I got a bike trainer. No, my bike doesn't need training and a bike trainer is not a person. It's a thing you attach to a bike that allows you to simulate a riding experience, or to put it differently, that allows you to pretend to ride your bike inside.
In truth, this is profoundly silly. As a general rule I hate to exercise by pretending to do stuff. Treadmills, rowers, and especially climbing stairs, all ways to pretend to do something. And a big reason I bike for exercise is because it's fun. The biggest single difference between the pretend activities and the real ones is the lack of fun. I mean, it's nice that I don't have to wear a helmet when I pretend ride, although I can't quite get over the fear that the bike is going to somehow wiggle loose and I'll careen toward the basement steps at 20 miles an hour (and 20 miles an hour, while slow in a car, is very fast when you're indoors). But the only way I'll feel the wind in my face if I turn on the fan.
The best thing about pretend riding is that you can watch TV while you're doing it. All of my attempts to do that when riding on the streets have been brutal failures. But what am I going to watch? As hard as I look, I can't find any shows that are wordless video of passing countryside, so I need some options. Commercials are annoying, and I don't want to have to keep changing channels. The best thing I've found so far is soccer. If you can start watching right around the beginning of a half, they run for at least 45 minutes straight. Fortunately, on Comcast there's lots of soccer on channel 1513, and I just like the idea of watching channel 1513 anyway.
In truth, this is profoundly silly. As a general rule I hate to exercise by pretending to do stuff. Treadmills, rowers, and especially climbing stairs, all ways to pretend to do something. And a big reason I bike for exercise is because it's fun. The biggest single difference between the pretend activities and the real ones is the lack of fun. I mean, it's nice that I don't have to wear a helmet when I pretend ride, although I can't quite get over the fear that the bike is going to somehow wiggle loose and I'll careen toward the basement steps at 20 miles an hour (and 20 miles an hour, while slow in a car, is very fast when you're indoors). But the only way I'll feel the wind in my face if I turn on the fan.
The best thing about pretend riding is that you can watch TV while you're doing it. All of my attempts to do that when riding on the streets have been brutal failures. But what am I going to watch? As hard as I look, I can't find any shows that are wordless video of passing countryside, so I need some options. Commercials are annoying, and I don't want to have to keep changing channels. The best thing I've found so far is soccer. If you can start watching right around the beginning of a half, they run for at least 45 minutes straight. Fortunately, on Comcast there's lots of soccer on channel 1513, and I just like the idea of watching channel 1513 anyway.
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Passing thoughts
I'm tired of driving. Not that I been drive all that much, but I've been doing it for like 40 years and I'm just tired of it. Maybe it's because too many people I encounter on the roads, while nice people I'm sure, are just not cut out to be drivers. Driving properly requires a combination of complete attention and strategic planning that is clearly beyond the ability of many people whom the state has deemed worthy of sharing the road with me.
Most folks probably don't think of strategic planning when they are driving, but that's a mistake. Driving is pretty difficult and bloody dangerous and one is foolish to think differently. But you can be strategic about it if you keep your objective in mind, and objective is simply this: Get from point A to Point B without bumping into anything. Everything else you do flows from that. Since it's much harder to avoid moving objects than stationary ones, keep the moving things (cars, trucks, bikes, people) as far away from your car as possible at all times, and never do anything that could be surprising to another driver.
Lately, the most frequent mistake I've seen people making is getting impatient behind someone making a left turn, swinging out to the right and going around them, especially on a road with 2 lanes in each direction. This is so risky as to be just plain stupid. You simply cannot look everywhere another car might be coming from at the same time, since you need to see (1) if there's someone coming in the right lane, (2) if someone behind you is doing the same thing at the same time, (3) if someone in front of you is doing the same thing at the same time, and (4) if someone going in the other direction is making a left turn into your lane as you swing around. Sorry, can't be done. If you get away with it you're lucky, but still stupid.
Most folks probably don't think of strategic planning when they are driving, but that's a mistake. Driving is pretty difficult and bloody dangerous and one is foolish to think differently. But you can be strategic about it if you keep your objective in mind, and objective is simply this: Get from point A to Point B without bumping into anything. Everything else you do flows from that. Since it's much harder to avoid moving objects than stationary ones, keep the moving things (cars, trucks, bikes, people) as far away from your car as possible at all times, and never do anything that could be surprising to another driver.
Lately, the most frequent mistake I've seen people making is getting impatient behind someone making a left turn, swinging out to the right and going around them, especially on a road with 2 lanes in each direction. This is so risky as to be just plain stupid. You simply cannot look everywhere another car might be coming from at the same time, since you need to see (1) if there's someone coming in the right lane, (2) if someone behind you is doing the same thing at the same time, (3) if someone in front of you is doing the same thing at the same time, and (4) if someone going in the other direction is making a left turn into your lane as you swing around. Sorry, can't be done. If you get away with it you're lucky, but still stupid.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Happy Birthday Frank!
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Sunday, October 23, 2011
So what is this thing called again?
I got an iPhone this week. I hadn't intended to; I was just waiting for something that I thought would be a noticeable upgrade over my prior phone, which was a 3 year-old original Droid. That phone worked very well. It was just very slow on the data end. So I got the iPhone because it had a fast processor. Plus everything else in my house is Apple, so why not my phone.
So far, with my new phone, I have created task lists and shopping lists, listened to music, gotten directions, checked train schedules, played solitaire, received and sent text messages and e-mail, and a played with the voice controlled stuff. Can we spot the obvious omission?
I've had the phone for 4 days now and have not made or received a single phone call. In fact, I don't even know if the phone part of the thing works. The other kinds of messaging things I've done have made it unnecessary to make phone calls. So I've used my phone a lot, just not as a phone.
This makes me think of two things that I said about mobile phones, one while I was working as a marketer in the early days of cellular phones, and one of which I said several years later when I first got my oldest child a cell phone. They both sound kind of stupid, but put them together and it all kind of makes sense, not that I knew that at a time.
Back in the late 80's when cellular phones first burst onto the scene, most people know they were big and heavy and inconvenient to carry around. In fairly short order, this began to change. At around the point when there were finally phones you could put in your pocket, I said to the guy running our cellular biz, "You know when this business will be really big? When you don't have to carry the damn phone around with you." In the early 00's, when deciding what phone to get for a child, we decided, "The purpose of the phone is to make phone calls, not to play games on," (this was a HUGE concern to parents at the time).
So here I am, carrying around this thing that does so much more than could have been imagined back in the 80's. Now, one could be excused from thinking small at that time, 5 years or so before the World Wide Web had been invented. We knew the cellular had data transmission capabilities, but at the time we were deciding whether it made more sense to have messaging devices be separate from the phone. Nobody thought of transmitting data as a major thing in any aspect of life or even business.
But in a way, I was right 20 years ago. I'm not carrying a phone around with me, at least not in the traditional sense. I'm carrying a computer that makes phone calls. It's a thing to play games and a whole bunch more. And as an advertising person, what's really interesting to me is that we still call it a phone, when the telephone part of it is almost an afterthought. We've redefined what the word 'phone' means.
So far, with my new phone, I have created task lists and shopping lists, listened to music, gotten directions, checked train schedules, played solitaire, received and sent text messages and e-mail, and a played with the voice controlled stuff. Can we spot the obvious omission?
I've had the phone for 4 days now and have not made or received a single phone call. In fact, I don't even know if the phone part of the thing works. The other kinds of messaging things I've done have made it unnecessary to make phone calls. So I've used my phone a lot, just not as a phone.
This makes me think of two things that I said about mobile phones, one while I was working as a marketer in the early days of cellular phones, and one of which I said several years later when I first got my oldest child a cell phone. They both sound kind of stupid, but put them together and it all kind of makes sense, not that I knew that at a time.
Back in the late 80's when cellular phones first burst onto the scene, most people know they were big and heavy and inconvenient to carry around. In fairly short order, this began to change. At around the point when there were finally phones you could put in your pocket, I said to the guy running our cellular biz, "You know when this business will be really big? When you don't have to carry the damn phone around with you." In the early 00's, when deciding what phone to get for a child, we decided, "The purpose of the phone is to make phone calls, not to play games on," (this was a HUGE concern to parents at the time).
So here I am, carrying around this thing that does so much more than could have been imagined back in the 80's. Now, one could be excused from thinking small at that time, 5 years or so before the World Wide Web had been invented. We knew the cellular had data transmission capabilities, but at the time we were deciding whether it made more sense to have messaging devices be separate from the phone. Nobody thought of transmitting data as a major thing in any aspect of life or even business.
But in a way, I was right 20 years ago. I'm not carrying a phone around with me, at least not in the traditional sense. I'm carrying a computer that makes phone calls. It's a thing to play games and a whole bunch more. And as an advertising person, what's really interesting to me is that we still call it a phone, when the telephone part of it is almost an afterthought. We've redefined what the word 'phone' means.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
No boo hoo
I find it strange to hear people upset about the fatal auto race crash this past weekend. Of course, I don't wish sudden untimely death on anyone, but more than mourning the poor guy who perished, there's a lot of hand-wringing about how the conditions weren't safe.
Well, DUH. In what universe is it ever safe to drive in heavy traffic on a curvy road at 200 miles per hour? Anyone who's ever tried that on the Schuykill can tell you that it's no easy feat getting from King of Prussia to Center City in 4 1/2 minutes without crashing.
Really, the fact that there are so few crashes is a testament to the skill of the drivers and a reasonably strict code of conduct, but there's an inherent tension between speed and safety. I think people tend to underestimate the force involved in hitting a stationary object that doesn't give when you hit it. The best way it's ever been explained to me was to try to imagine what it would be like if you were just standing there and a brick wall came along and hit you at 40 miles per hour.
And the problem with high speed is that the force with which you hit the wall is based on the amount of deceleration you do, or how quickly your velocity decreases (which is pretty quick when you hit a wall). I could throw some numbers around, but I know neither what they signify nor what they really mean in terms of bodily harm. Key point though: Newton's laws of motion say that if you hit an immovable object that the object necessarily hits back with an equal force (that's the only way the motion can stop). That's actually the force that crumples your car. The way you get hurt is that you are moving at the same speed of the car and do not stop until something applies an equal and opposite force to you. This tends to hurt.
The reason we have airbags is that they increase the time it takes for that force to be applied- the stopping is more gradual, and since time is the denominator of the force formula, the bigger it is, the less force. Less force means less pain and less frequent death.
In any event, there's only so much you can do to mitigate the damage done to the body in a high speed crash. And that's not even talking about the fire part, which is another inevitable result of using combustable fuel to power the cars.
I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with imposing safety measures, but unless you take some of the speed out of the equation, so to speak, there's only a limited amount you can do.
Well, DUH. In what universe is it ever safe to drive in heavy traffic on a curvy road at 200 miles per hour? Anyone who's ever tried that on the Schuykill can tell you that it's no easy feat getting from King of Prussia to Center City in 4 1/2 minutes without crashing.
Really, the fact that there are so few crashes is a testament to the skill of the drivers and a reasonably strict code of conduct, but there's an inherent tension between speed and safety. I think people tend to underestimate the force involved in hitting a stationary object that doesn't give when you hit it. The best way it's ever been explained to me was to try to imagine what it would be like if you were just standing there and a brick wall came along and hit you at 40 miles per hour.
And the problem with high speed is that the force with which you hit the wall is based on the amount of deceleration you do, or how quickly your velocity decreases (which is pretty quick when you hit a wall). I could throw some numbers around, but I know neither what they signify nor what they really mean in terms of bodily harm. Key point though: Newton's laws of motion say that if you hit an immovable object that the object necessarily hits back with an equal force (that's the only way the motion can stop). That's actually the force that crumples your car. The way you get hurt is that you are moving at the same speed of the car and do not stop until something applies an equal and opposite force to you. This tends to hurt.
The reason we have airbags is that they increase the time it takes for that force to be applied- the stopping is more gradual, and since time is the denominator of the force formula, the bigger it is, the less force. Less force means less pain and less frequent death.
In any event, there's only so much you can do to mitigate the damage done to the body in a high speed crash. And that's not even talking about the fire part, which is another inevitable result of using combustable fuel to power the cars.
I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with imposing safety measures, but unless you take some of the speed out of the equation, so to speak, there's only a limited amount you can do.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Something's fishy
Being a male in his 50's, I have to worry about all kinds of things. Many of these things are health-related. I have to worry about health related things because, I gather, otherwise I will DIE. I don't particularly want to die, though I don't really know anything about what it would be like to do so. But since it's inevitable I'll eventually find out what it's like anyway, I might as well do the other thing for as long as I can.
This means several things, some of which I do, some of which I kind of do. They don't do a lot of studies on kind of doing things, so I know I'm on shaky ground in some instances.
One of the top things men my age need to worry about is cholesterol. Actually, I long for the day when it was as simple as cholesterol. Now there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. There's also something called triglycerides, which I don't think is exactly cholesterol but I've heard it's bad. I have no idea what my triglyceride level is or should be, but I had a friend visiting recently who was under doctor's orders to lower his triglycerides. He was to do so by exercising more frequently and by taking fish oil.
I've taken fish oil in the past because it's supposed to be good for you. In fact, if you use the internet, it's very easy to find many many many things that fish oil is good for. There's only one problem. Fish oil comes from fish. This may seem obvious, but in nature, for example, calcium comes from a number of sources, but it can be made (or purified anyway, I don't think you can technically "make" calcium) in a lab into a pill. Fish oil, on the other hand, comes from fish, or more accurately from things fish eat via the fish. And that's it. They can't make it or get it from anywhere else.
This means that if you wish to take a fish oil supplement, it comes in a capsule full of, yes, oil from fish. This has some downsides, of course. First of all, in order to get the purported benefits, you need to consume a fair amount of the stuff, which means taking 3 or 4 very large capsules every day. Even if that's not a problem, fish oil tastes like, yes, fish. Maybe not when you first take it, but once the capsule part dissolves, you've got it. The typical way you get it is affectionately known as fish burps. Re-peats will do as well. These can go on for a while, so even if you take it with a meal, as recommended, within a half hour you'll think you had fish for dinner.
As a result, I am now taking what is referred to as "Pharmaceutical Grade Fish Oil," otherwise known as the very expensive fish oil. The kind I'm using is about $40 per month and I know there are more expensive kinds. I've only taken it once, but so far I am fish burp-free and I can feel my triglycerides dropping as I sit her.
This means several things, some of which I do, some of which I kind of do. They don't do a lot of studies on kind of doing things, so I know I'm on shaky ground in some instances.
One of the top things men my age need to worry about is cholesterol. Actually, I long for the day when it was as simple as cholesterol. Now there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. There's also something called triglycerides, which I don't think is exactly cholesterol but I've heard it's bad. I have no idea what my triglyceride level is or should be, but I had a friend visiting recently who was under doctor's orders to lower his triglycerides. He was to do so by exercising more frequently and by taking fish oil.
I've taken fish oil in the past because it's supposed to be good for you. In fact, if you use the internet, it's very easy to find many many many things that fish oil is good for. There's only one problem. Fish oil comes from fish. This may seem obvious, but in nature, for example, calcium comes from a number of sources, but it can be made (or purified anyway, I don't think you can technically "make" calcium) in a lab into a pill. Fish oil, on the other hand, comes from fish, or more accurately from things fish eat via the fish. And that's it. They can't make it or get it from anywhere else.
This means that if you wish to take a fish oil supplement, it comes in a capsule full of, yes, oil from fish. This has some downsides, of course. First of all, in order to get the purported benefits, you need to consume a fair amount of the stuff, which means taking 3 or 4 very large capsules every day. Even if that's not a problem, fish oil tastes like, yes, fish. Maybe not when you first take it, but once the capsule part dissolves, you've got it. The typical way you get it is affectionately known as fish burps. Re-peats will do as well. These can go on for a while, so even if you take it with a meal, as recommended, within a half hour you'll think you had fish for dinner.
As a result, I am now taking what is referred to as "Pharmaceutical Grade Fish Oil," otherwise known as the very expensive fish oil. The kind I'm using is about $40 per month and I know there are more expensive kinds. I've only taken it once, but so far I am fish burp-free and I can feel my triglycerides dropping as I sit her.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Hallowverkill
I went to Target to try to buy some halloween candy. I've been aware that Halloween is now the closest thing to Christmas as far as consumer spending is concerned (estimated to be close to $7 billion this year- in the middle of a recession), but that doesn't even begin to cover its takeover of every store in neighborhood. Acme has 3 separate candy displays, the entire front of any Rite Aid can only be described as spooktacular, and Target? Well, Target has 5 display aisles of candy on top of the regular candy aisles.
Why do they need so much space? Are there suddenly more kinds of candy? Is it all candy corn? Nope, it's mixing and matching of existing products, with the occasional exception like Reece's pumpkin-shaped (but thankfully not flavored) peanut butter cups, and bag sizes. Mars, the largest candy maker, has 8 different kinds of chocolates that might show up, 10 if you include multiple M&Ms varieties. I know from teaching this stuff that if you make a mixture of 4 of these, you have 210 different combinations. Sell them in bags of 50, 100, and 150 and you now have 630 possibilities. Add in the other candy companies and you could argue that they're actually exhibiting restraint.
Since I try to only buy halloween candy that I will eat myself, making leftovers a feature and not a bug, I have to rifle through the shelves to make sure I get the combinations that have good variety but not one weirdo thing that'll end up in the garbage. Hence, 15 minutes doing nothing but wandering in and out of those 5 aisles at Target to get the bags with optimal variety and minimal waste. I'll give you the rundown after the trick or treaters have been through.
Oh, and don't let me forget to remind everyone of the importance of not eating anything pumpkin flavored. Not that anyone even knows what pumpkin tastes like anyway.
Why do they need so much space? Are there suddenly more kinds of candy? Is it all candy corn? Nope, it's mixing and matching of existing products, with the occasional exception like Reece's pumpkin-shaped (but thankfully not flavored) peanut butter cups, and bag sizes. Mars, the largest candy maker, has 8 different kinds of chocolates that might show up, 10 if you include multiple M&Ms varieties. I know from teaching this stuff that if you make a mixture of 4 of these, you have 210 different combinations. Sell them in bags of 50, 100, and 150 and you now have 630 possibilities. Add in the other candy companies and you could argue that they're actually exhibiting restraint.
Since I try to only buy halloween candy that I will eat myself, making leftovers a feature and not a bug, I have to rifle through the shelves to make sure I get the combinations that have good variety but not one weirdo thing that'll end up in the garbage. Hence, 15 minutes doing nothing but wandering in and out of those 5 aisles at Target to get the bags with optimal variety and minimal waste. I'll give you the rundown after the trick or treaters have been through.
Oh, and don't let me forget to remind everyone of the importance of not eating anything pumpkin flavored. Not that anyone even knows what pumpkin tastes like anyway.
Early morning metaphysics
I was driving back from dropping my daughter off at school at 7AM and I saw there was traffic on the main thoroughfare, City Avenue. There is seldom any traffic at 7AM, so I was surprised. I then saw a car with its flashers on in the right lane blocking the road, so the traffic made sense. I don't normally go on City Avenue anyway, but rather use a parallel road closer to my house.
As I head up that road and approach a traffic light, I see a long line of cars waiting. My initial thought is, why are there so many cars here? Then my exact thought was, "Oh they're just from City Avenue, they're not really here."
Because the cars clearly were here, this made me wonder, from a philosophical point of view, whether the people who were on the road as a detour existed in a different plane of reality from people like me who were on the road because it's my usual road. I would tend to think that the answer is yes. Whatever the physical manifestations, the people in the detouring cars were operating on a different level of consciousness than I, because all they were thinking about was how and when would they get back to City Avenue. They were, in a certain sense, not really there.
It was 7 AM and I was sleepy, so I began to think about whether this was true in a broader sense. If I'm not really thinking about where I'm going but instead just going along a familiar path, was I really there during the part I can't remember when I've arrived? Fortunately, I was soon home. Philosophers must have very strange lives if this is the way they think all the time.
As I head up that road and approach a traffic light, I see a long line of cars waiting. My initial thought is, why are there so many cars here? Then my exact thought was, "Oh they're just from City Avenue, they're not really here."
Because the cars clearly were here, this made me wonder, from a philosophical point of view, whether the people who were on the road as a detour existed in a different plane of reality from people like me who were on the road because it's my usual road. I would tend to think that the answer is yes. Whatever the physical manifestations, the people in the detouring cars were operating on a different level of consciousness than I, because all they were thinking about was how and when would they get back to City Avenue. They were, in a certain sense, not really there.
It was 7 AM and I was sleepy, so I began to think about whether this was true in a broader sense. If I'm not really thinking about where I'm going but instead just going along a familiar path, was I really there during the part I can't remember when I've arrived? Fortunately, I was soon home. Philosophers must have very strange lives if this is the way they think all the time.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Friends, not food
I'm not one to criticize Community Supported Agriculture, which supports small farms by having members pay upfront for fruit and vegetables to be delivered later. And I love getting a crate of whatever they happen to be harvesting this year. But every once in a while, they try to pawn something off as a crop that just isn't.
This week it was Sweet Potato Leaves. Really? Does anybody genuinely think that sweet potato leaves are food? If they were, they would have their own name and not be called the leaves of something that is food.
Earlier this year we got something called garlic scapes, which I think are some vestigial part of the garlic plant (okay, I made that up) and taste like a combination of scallions and garlic, without any of the good flavor notes. I've been to a farmer's market where they sell spreads and pesto made with garlic scapes and they are universally awful. The other thing we got were pea shoots. Again, it's a by-product of growing peas, not its own thing.
The farmers try to trick you into taking this stuff by including recipes using them and treating them as exotic ingredients. But ultimately, they are the kinds of things that farmers probably eat when there's absolutely nothing else to eat and that they would never even try to sell because nobody would ever buy them.
Hope we get some actual sweet potatoes soon.
This week it was Sweet Potato Leaves. Really? Does anybody genuinely think that sweet potato leaves are food? If they were, they would have their own name and not be called the leaves of something that is food.
Earlier this year we got something called garlic scapes, which I think are some vestigial part of the garlic plant (okay, I made that up) and taste like a combination of scallions and garlic, without any of the good flavor notes. I've been to a farmer's market where they sell spreads and pesto made with garlic scapes and they are universally awful. The other thing we got were pea shoots. Again, it's a by-product of growing peas, not its own thing.
The farmers try to trick you into taking this stuff by including recipes using them and treating them as exotic ingredients. But ultimately, they are the kinds of things that farmers probably eat when there's absolutely nothing else to eat and that they would never even try to sell because nobody would ever buy them.
Hope we get some actual sweet potatoes soon.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Decaf night
A lot of schools have things they call Coffee House, where kids come and perform mostly but not exclusively music. If this were talking place at an actual coffee house it probably wouldn't be called a coffee house, but that's another matter. This is a charming proposition, if fraught with risk from the perspective of the listener. It reminds me of the old Chris Rock line, "You know, they call it Community College because everyone in the community can go there." It always has the potential for awfulness.
This potential is one of the charms at my daughter's school, where they not only don't call it a coffee house but hold it in a room where no coffee or drinks of any kind are allowed (because why would a bunch of singers ever want a drink of water?). This particular school has these things every month or so, with the number of performers ranging from 15 to nearly thrice that.
The popularity of these shows tends to grow as the school year progresses, and the room's seats were about half full when the show began by showing a very nicely done if unremarkable music video done by students. Then the MC came on and immediately starts bemoaning the small size of the crowd. He continued to do so throughout the show, until a few of us called out, "Hey! The people you're talking to are here! You're complaining to the wrong people."
The performances range from bad karaoke types of things to some really excellent stuff to things that are just fun. The problem with many of the singers is the American Idol Syndrome, which requires one to have every song build to a huge, belted out crescendo. The better performers realize there's more than one way to sing a song and give the audience something beautiful or charming. There were also a couple of songs where I thought, "This is a good song to open a cellophane-wrapped candy to," where the aural assault was so intense that I literally grimaced.
One of the ways people do things differently is to not decide what they're going to perform until the day before or even day of. This has increased entertainment value if, for example, they have never even considered doing the song they've chosen, meaning they have to start from scratch, learning words and music a few hours before show time. You find these people frantically rehearsing in various alcoves of the building and outside until minutes before the show. It's all done in good fun and the crowd cheers everyone.
My favorite moment in the past year was when a lone 8th grader with an acoustic guitar decided to perform "Tubthumper" by Chumbawamba. He did a good job stumbling through and the audience was more than happy to join in for a rousing "I get knocked down, but I get up again" chorus. And we all went home happy.
This potential is one of the charms at my daughter's school, where they not only don't call it a coffee house but hold it in a room where no coffee or drinks of any kind are allowed (because why would a bunch of singers ever want a drink of water?). This particular school has these things every month or so, with the number of performers ranging from 15 to nearly thrice that.
The popularity of these shows tends to grow as the school year progresses, and the room's seats were about half full when the show began by showing a very nicely done if unremarkable music video done by students. Then the MC came on and immediately starts bemoaning the small size of the crowd. He continued to do so throughout the show, until a few of us called out, "Hey! The people you're talking to are here! You're complaining to the wrong people."
The performances range from bad karaoke types of things to some really excellent stuff to things that are just fun. The problem with many of the singers is the American Idol Syndrome, which requires one to have every song build to a huge, belted out crescendo. The better performers realize there's more than one way to sing a song and give the audience something beautiful or charming. There were also a couple of songs where I thought, "This is a good song to open a cellophane-wrapped candy to," where the aural assault was so intense that I literally grimaced.
One of the ways people do things differently is to not decide what they're going to perform until the day before or even day of. This has increased entertainment value if, for example, they have never even considered doing the song they've chosen, meaning they have to start from scratch, learning words and music a few hours before show time. You find these people frantically rehearsing in various alcoves of the building and outside until minutes before the show. It's all done in good fun and the crowd cheers everyone.
My favorite moment in the past year was when a lone 8th grader with an acoustic guitar decided to perform "Tubthumper" by Chumbawamba. He did a good job stumbling through and the audience was more than happy to join in for a rousing "I get knocked down, but I get up again" chorus. And we all went home happy.
Saturday, October 08, 2011
End of Phillies 2011
Last night was pretty sad. The crowd was great. I hate it when people only get loud when the scoreboard and music urge them to do so. Last night, it got louder after that nonsense stopped.
The game itself was an absolute masterpiece. I don't think I've ever seen two pitchers pitch so well against each other. Take out the first two batters of the game and you have 17 consecutive scoreless innings by the starters. It's impossible to know which pitcher was better. Even though the Cardinals scored and the Phillies didn't, they're a better hitting team to begin with.
It was sad to think it might have been the last time I cheered for Rollins and Madson. It was sad to think I'll probably never yell "Rauuul!" again. It was sad to see Howard go down in a heap. It's sad to see Charlie Manuel's faith in his players go unrewarded.
I could give you my in-depth analysis of how and why this series ended the way it did, but there's so much baseball writing out there that it seems pointless. From the third inning of the second game on, the Cardinals played better, by whatever measure you might care to use.
But what's saddest for me is that I don't get to go to any more games this year. I don't think I've ever enjoyed watching baseball more than I did this spring and summer, miserable weather and all. I'll miss the energy and the fun and the way it made me feel to be there and part of it. It was a fantastic season and I loved every minute. I just could have used a few more hours of it.
Now my raft of crimson t-shirts and my ballpark rain kit are put away, the year's souvenirs locked up in a zipper bag, and it's time to watch some good baseball without really caring who wins. And to hope that the time until pitchers and catchers report to camp soon feels shorter than it does right now.
The game itself was an absolute masterpiece. I don't think I've ever seen two pitchers pitch so well against each other. Take out the first two batters of the game and you have 17 consecutive scoreless innings by the starters. It's impossible to know which pitcher was better. Even though the Cardinals scored and the Phillies didn't, they're a better hitting team to begin with.
It was sad to think it might have been the last time I cheered for Rollins and Madson. It was sad to think I'll probably never yell "Rauuul!" again. It was sad to see Howard go down in a heap. It's sad to see Charlie Manuel's faith in his players go unrewarded.
I could give you my in-depth analysis of how and why this series ended the way it did, but there's so much baseball writing out there that it seems pointless. From the third inning of the second game on, the Cardinals played better, by whatever measure you might care to use.
But what's saddest for me is that I don't get to go to any more games this year. I don't think I've ever enjoyed watching baseball more than I did this spring and summer, miserable weather and all. I'll miss the energy and the fun and the way it made me feel to be there and part of it. It was a fantastic season and I loved every minute. I just could have used a few more hours of it.
Now my raft of crimson t-shirts and my ballpark rain kit are put away, the year's souvenirs locked up in a zipper bag, and it's time to watch some good baseball without really caring who wins. And to hope that the time until pitchers and catchers report to camp soon feels shorter than it does right now.
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
I love getting e-mail
Here's one I got this evening:
I was really confused with the homework, will we be going over it in class? Also, the soccer team has a game tomorrow and our dismissal is at 2:30 so we will only have about 10 minutes of your class
I was really confused with the homework, will we be going over it in class? Also, the soccer team has a game tomorrow and our dismissal is at 2:30 so we will only have about 10 minutes of your class
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Thank you for not helping
I was in Acme today and every time I paused or hesitated somewhere, an Acme employee was right on the spot asking me if I needed help.
I found this extremely irritating. I've been shopping at Acme for 20 years and throughout that time, the one constant has been their awful customer service. The checkout lines were always long and slow, and it was clear that nobody there had any interest in getting customers out of the store efficiently. Nobody smiled and certainly nobody ever offered to help. I've grown comfortable with this arrangement, and since they put in the self-service cashier I almost never have contact with an employee.
Over the years, I've become proud of my self-sufficiency and the last thing I expect when I step in the store is assistance. I just want to tell them, damgummit I can do it myself. I'm not a hillbilly so I don't, but I am tempted to wear a t-shirt that says "I Know What I'm Doing. Just Leave Me Alone."
I found this extremely irritating. I've been shopping at Acme for 20 years and throughout that time, the one constant has been their awful customer service. The checkout lines were always long and slow, and it was clear that nobody there had any interest in getting customers out of the store efficiently. Nobody smiled and certainly nobody ever offered to help. I've grown comfortable with this arrangement, and since they put in the self-service cashier I almost never have contact with an employee.
Over the years, I've become proud of my self-sufficiency and the last thing I expect when I step in the store is assistance. I just want to tell them, damgummit I can do it myself. I'm not a hillbilly so I don't, but I am tempted to wear a t-shirt that says "I Know What I'm Doing. Just Leave Me Alone."
Sunday, September 25, 2011
MS City to Shore 2011
Every time I do this ride it's different. The first time is hard because unless you're one of those strange people who ride 80 miles a day on a regular basis, you're likely to have trouble pacing yourself. The second time I had myself incredibly well trained and it was very fast and almost easy. And so on.
This year, I did a just fair job of training. On the good side, I knew what I was in for. On the bad side, I'm now 5 years older than the first time and feeling it a bit. So I decided I'd leave a bit later to get more sleep and take it easy. So instead of getting up at 5:30 AM I set my alarm for 6. I woke up at 6 and then immediately fell back asleep and reawakened at 6:45 and flipped out. The only saving grace was that I had looked over the race materials the night before and knew for certain that I had until 8 AM to be on the road and the starting line is around 30 minutes from my house.
Although I'm older, I've retained the ability to dress myself and make coffee, and really, what else do you need? I was out of the house at 7:05, got parked by 7:35 and on the road at 7:40, less than an hour after I'd woken up.
The weather forecast had been ranging from lousy to dreadful, but it turned out to be near-prefect, in the 70's, slight sunshine, no wind and no rain. I did about 2 hours of this ride in the rain one year and it is no fun at all.
The first few miles of the ride rolls through the southeastern part of Cherry Hill (I think; New Jersey suburbs are mysterious to me except I can find Wegman's). Even in the early stages you can see the various sorts of people who do this ride. There are a number of people roughly like me- middle-aged folks riding solo. Mostly men but a decent cohort of women too. We're generally serious riders and keep up a decent pace. There are the socialites- people doing the ride with a friend or two, riding 2 or 3 abreast, talking non-stop, and generally holding up the people behind them. There are the big young men, whose discussions revolve mostly around how fast they're intending to do, who zoom past periodically. And there are the teams. These are mostly corporate and vary widely in quality. The bigger companies/organizations have dozens of people, some of them very fast and some very slow.
The ride was almost shockingly problem free for me. I never felt overly fatigued. In a 5-6 hour ride like this, you can divide it roughly into 4 parts- the beginning, where you're feeling fresh, then part 2, where you're warmed up and rolling along pretty well. Usually the trouble, if there is any, happens in part 3, from miles 40-60. At this point, you are definitely no longer fresh, and unless you've been training like crazy, you've now ridden further than you have at any point in the recent past. My 4 longest training rides ranged from 30-36 miles, for example. Your legs are dead and your butt is not too happy either. Once you're past the 60 mile mark you can start to feel the finish approaching and you get an adrenaline rush. Just in time for the bridges.
The ride is almost entirely flat and miles 10-65 are pretty rural. Then it gets more populated as you approach the shore, and fiendishly, at mile 74 you can see, looming in the distance, the two bridges from the mainland to Ocean City. The race personnel, so supportive for the first 73 miles, delight in razzing you as you approach this point. The bridges are tall and very much exposed to the elements. The first year I did the ride, there was a stiff onshore breeze that made it necessary to pedal pretty hard to get down the bridge, much less up it.
The bridges encapsulated my problem with this year's ride. As the event has gotten larger, the participants' understanding of group cycling etiquette has decreased. You can no longer count on your fellow cyclists to call out obstacles or signal that they're slowing or stopping. A lot of people were routinely violating basic rules of the road, mostly by insisting on riding side by side, even on busy roads with traffic coming from the back. It's both rude and dangerous. This caused me to ride impetuously at times, bursting out of a pack and swinging almost left of center to pass. This isn't fun to do anywhere, but on a bridge it's insane.
I have an idiosyncratic way of climbing, where I go as fast as I can in high gear until the hill starts to bite, when I downshift and continue pedaling furiously until I near the top at which point I all but stop and coast over the crest. I don't know anyone else who rides like this and I'd imagine it'd be infuriating to someone trying to ride with me, which is part of why I prefer to ride alone. Here, though, I kept getting caught behind clumps of people not riding single file and not staying to the right, and since I hate slowing down going uphill, not only was I dealing with the climb but I was trying to not get rear-ended by a car as I swing around.
But these are quibbles. I enjoyed the ride, once I knew I was getting there in time to do it, and I raised $1000 for a good cause. At the end, they have food and music and a t-shirt and buses back to the start point.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Advertisinguese
To understand how advertising works, you need to pay attention to the way the words are put together. For instance, here's the exact wording of a poster at SuperFresh: You won't find better tasting beef at any other supermarket in the Northeast. Guaranteed. Woodson and James Angus Beef.
So what exactly does this mean? The key point to understand is that in advertising language, saying your product is "better" is the ultimate claim. In order to broadcast that claim of print it in a reputable outlet, you must offer hard evidence that your product is, in fact, superior to the other product. To say your product is "best" means only that nobody else is better, so, for example, you can say your brand of salt is the best-tasting, even though salt is salt and it all tastes the same, or that your detergent is best for removing stains. It would really mean what people think of as "best" if they said it was better that every other detergent for removing stains.
So what I saw on the sign was a weasely way of trying to get the word "Better" into the ad, and it certainly sounds superior to, "Our beef will taste at a minimum the same as beef from every other supermarket in the northeast," which is what it means. My two favorite weasel phrases? "Fresh picked," (well duh, of course it's fresh when it's picked) and "Hearth baked," (hearth means oven, and you got some other place you're baking stuff?).
I'm also intrigued by the guarantee. Do you think they'd argue with you and refuse to give your money back if you said you found better-tasting beef? What if you got your beef at someplace other than a supermarket. And what if you'd bought your beef in a border state, like Maryland, which is not technically in the Northeast? And who the heck are Woodson and James? Are those first or last names? And do you think they're real names or names the marketing manager thought sounded western and rancher-like? Same for Target's Sutton and Dodge Beef.
Not sayin' there's anything wrong with SuperFresh beef, just that it's not better when you use the words that way.
So what exactly does this mean? The key point to understand is that in advertising language, saying your product is "better" is the ultimate claim. In order to broadcast that claim of print it in a reputable outlet, you must offer hard evidence that your product is, in fact, superior to the other product. To say your product is "best" means only that nobody else is better, so, for example, you can say your brand of salt is the best-tasting, even though salt is salt and it all tastes the same, or that your detergent is best for removing stains. It would really mean what people think of as "best" if they said it was better that every other detergent for removing stains.
So what I saw on the sign was a weasely way of trying to get the word "Better" into the ad, and it certainly sounds superior to, "Our beef will taste at a minimum the same as beef from every other supermarket in the northeast," which is what it means. My two favorite weasel phrases? "Fresh picked," (well duh, of course it's fresh when it's picked) and "Hearth baked," (hearth means oven, and you got some other place you're baking stuff?).
I'm also intrigued by the guarantee. Do you think they'd argue with you and refuse to give your money back if you said you found better-tasting beef? What if you got your beef at someplace other than a supermarket. And what if you'd bought your beef in a border state, like Maryland, which is not technically in the Northeast? And who the heck are Woodson and James? Are those first or last names? And do you think they're real names or names the marketing manager thought sounded western and rancher-like? Same for Target's Sutton and Dodge Beef.
Not sayin' there's anything wrong with SuperFresh beef, just that it's not better when you use the words that way.
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