Betting the over/under

Now that Irene has passed, it's time for a week of second-guessing everyone from the forecasters to the public officials who designed the response, followed by a hearty round of recriminations.

Hurricane forecasting is right up there with snowfall forecasting as an inexact process. It's kind of miraculous (and what I mean by miraculous is the application of almost indescribably complex science) that they have any idea where the hurricane is going. Shoot, I'm sitting at the breakfast table and I don't even know where I'm going next.

So what's a local official to do? This is yet another application of error-based decision-making, which is one of my favorite tools. Since you don't know what's going to happen, assume you make the wrong decision and weigh the consequences. In a case like this, the consequences of not evacuating when it's necessary are far worse than if you do evacuate and it's not necessary. I'm sympathetic to those who had their vacations ruined, but when circumstances are potentially catastrophic, it pays to overreact.

Chatting with the service guys

Me: If I drain the pool too much I'm going to flood my neighbor's yard.
Rich the Pool Guy: Frank, we're all sharing water this weekend.

Me: This dogwood tree is old and everyone tells us it's declining and we should take it out.
Dean the Tree Guy: Well, I'm declining too but nobody's taking me out.

It's Lancastic!

That's either really good or really lame.

I have a good friend who grew up around Lancaster and is mystified by the fact that people go there for vacations. I can kind of understand. There seemed to be lots and lots of people around, but I really have no idea what they were doing. There's a couple of outlet malls, but there are plenty of those elsewhere. It's fun seeing the Amish in their carts and the farms are pretty. There are some cute shops here and there and a couple of historical museums and a small amusement park. So? I really don't know.

It was perfect for me in this instance, but I was actively looking for quiet and nice bike rides. When I had a Saturday night free I was shocked at how little there was in the weekend section of the paper. There was an airshow during the day but if I wanted to do something at night I could bowl or go to the movies or drink. I didn't bowl or go to the movies. I guess it's just kind of a sleepy small city. Which is fine, but why all the tourists then?

One thing that intrigues me is how into their snack food these people are. There are a astounding number of small brands of pretzels and potato chips available in every store. This may be a product of the relative lack of cultural opportunities or maybe they just like crispy stuff. In any event, it makes for tasty souvenirs.

Lancaster, Part 2

On Sunday I took what the cycling club calls the Witness Ride, as it takes you past the farm where they filmed the movie Witness. I started at the Strasburg Train Museum, which is kind of easy to spot as you drive by because of, well, because of the dozen or so trains right by the roadside, including a working steam engine that you can ride on.

This proved to be a much more difficult ride than Saturday's. First, my legs didn't have nearly the same kind of pep after riding 36 miles, about double the length of my previous longest ride this year, the afternoon before. Second, this course is noticeably hillier. But above all, the final 8 miles were (and I can't blame the bike club for this) done in a downpour. I had to stop 3 separate times because it was just too hard to see, so those last 8 miles took well over an hour.

Until it got to the point where I couldn't see anything anymore, it's a very pretty ride. The Witness farm is lovely, though I'm not sure why they chose that one versus any of the other attractive farms in the area. I did eventually make the connection that if the name of the road had the words "hill" or "summit" in it, that I should be prepared to climb. It did make me wonder what the courses marked "Hilly" (as opposed to "Rolling Hills") would be like. But once you climbed the hills the view was terrific, if you like looking at farms and corn and alfalfa and (I think) tobacco. I got to pass another horsedrawn cart. I rode through Bird-In-Hand and Intercourse.

Riding in the rain is somewhat entertaining if you don't demand actual fun out of your entertainment. Instead of just staying to the side and trying to keep on smooth road and away from gravel and horse poop I was having to find the high spots on the roads to keep from having to ride through puddles. Fortunately, there were very few cars anywhere on the ride. Nonetheless, my feet were squishing after 15 minutes or so, and it's hard to gather any momentum when you're pushing through water.

If part of what I wanted to do this weekend was to get my mind off everything else, this was good because you really can't think of anything else when you're riding in the rain and have no idea where you are. Note to self: next time, make sure tip sheets are printed in waterproof ink. Another note to self: Next time, make sure to bring 2 copies of the tip sheet. Yes, I lost my tip sheet during the rain. Fortunately, by that time I was pretty close to the end and remembered just enough to find my way back.

It had stopped raining by the time I got to the car. Not that it did me any good; I was drenched. I had already picked out a place to eat lunch near where I'd parked, but I couldn't bring myself to stop, so I drove back to the hotel, took a shower (which, by the way, failed to remove all the road grease from my shins in spite of vigorous rubbing) and returned to Strasburg, where I lunched on Corn Chowder (probably the best I've had) and a Reuben at Isaac's Famous Grilled Sandwiches. I then went to the Strasburg Creamery for some ice cream. I'm not so hot on these old-timey places, but when you walk in you can smell the waffle cones being made and that was enough for me. There was a young woman near the rear of the store with a semicircular counter in front of her with 8 waffle irons, and she was cooking and rolling (around a cone-shaped mold) as fast as she could.

Back to the hotel for a nap and then out for a round of mini golf. Thanks to Yelp, I found Village Greens, the most kick-ass mini golf I've ever played. By the 3rd hole I'd stopped keeping score and started tracking how many times my ball went off the course. They have buckets of extra balls at several holes in case you didn't feel like fishing your ball out of the stream, and course is designed to maximize the water hazard potential of the stream. In the woods and very pretty. Highly recommended.

Finally, I had to do a Smorgasbord. I wanted to know how a smorgasbord was different from a buffet. Answer? It isn't. I think there's more stuff, but that doesn't strike me as a fundamental difference. I chose to eat at Hershey Farm because it was close to the mini golf and was both well reviewed and open.

One of the nice things about riding 35 miles on a bike is that you can stuff yourself later. This was a good place to do it. The web site says over 100 choices, and even keeping in mind that this includes the salad dressings and the different kinds of bread, there was a lot of stuff to eat. Almost everything was very good. Or maybe I was just very hungry. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves too, and it didn't seem like there were more fat people there than in the general population as I would have expected at a smorgasbord.

And that was it. A short ride in the morning and then home.
 

Lancaster, Part 1

I needed a quick solo getaway for a weekend to clear my head, and chose Lancaster because it was close and had what looked like a very nice selection of medium length (20-35 mile) bike rides with tip sheets (important if you're out in the middle of nowhere and don't know where you're going, both of which described me- here's what a tip sheet looks like).

I stupidly showed up without a hotel reservation. Who would have thought there's be so many people in a tourist area on a August weekend? D'oh. So the first place I stopped had no rooms, but they did have free wifi in the lobby so I made a reservation at the Courtyard by Marriott. I'll write a hotel review later, but my first order of business was to go riding, so while housekeeping was getting the rooms ready, I took off for my first ride, what's called the Ephrata Cloister Ride.

I started at some kind of farm museum and headed north (I think). I rode through some corn and then by some office parks and when I came back out into the corn, I saw a biplane doing loops and stalls and all kinds of crazy stuff. As I rode along, I saw it was an air show at the local airport. Very distracting but very cool.

The ride is described as being rolling hills, which I guess is a reasonable description. The country is really pretty and as someone whose main experience is suburban riding, them main thing that strikes me is the scarcity of other cars or people. Once I left the air show area, where there were people all over the sides of the roads, I saw almost nobody for the next hour. I saw a pretty unimpressive 13th century castle that had been disassembled in England and transported here. I guess the really good castles weren't available.

I began to realize as I went along that the route was structure in a way to use up every bit of back road in  an area, taking the most indirect way possible to get from one place to the next. I noticed this when I came back by the air show for the second time (jets in formation doing all kinds of outrageous tricks) a half hour after my first go-by. This is fine when the purpose is to meander, and so I spent the day reveling endless cornfields and the varying smells of animal dung, while avoiding what dung is on the road.

The other thing I learned on this ride is that I can whip any of those horsedrawn carts in a head-to-head, though they do pretty good going uphill and it's a bit discouraging to hear them stay close after I've blown by them. Clip-clop clip-clop.

Lunch in the almost unbearably cute town of Lititz and dinner at a dive sports bar in downtown Lancaster after I saw that there is nothing, and I really mean nothing, going on in this town on a Saturday night. I thought about going bowling after watching the game, but decided to sleep instead. I'll do day 2 in a separate entry.

Circular Logic

One of the things I like about going to Martha's Vineyard is how little it changes from visit to visit. I haven't been here for a real visit in 6 years or so, but not only is the woman at the fish market the same woman I remember from last time, but she looks exactly the same too. The Saturday Farmer's market has the same vendors, the same preppy sweaters adorn the shops in town, and the weather still veers crazily between bright, clear and sunny and grey, windy and impossibly humid (bring a paperback book here and I dare you to keep the cover from curling up).

Another thing that never changes here is the news. I guess that's not entirely true because for the first 10 years I was here every headline was about the ferry and the financial problems of the quasi-public ferry company and the failings of the people running the company. That seems to have calmed down now, and it's rare to hear people complain about the ferries.

On the other hand, there is one thing that has remained front and center in the island's consciousness since I began visiting the early 80's: The intersection of Barnes Road and Vineyard Haven-Edgartown Road. All of the main towns on the island are in its northeastern corner, forming a wide, flat triangle. Vineyard Haven is to the west (or left on the map), Edgartown to the east (right) and Oak Bluffs central and a bit north (up). Vineyard Haven-Edgartown Road, as you might guess, crosses east and west between the two towns. It's a busy road, especially at a few peak times. Barnes Road goes north-south and is the only direct way to Oak Bluffs from the rest of the island.

The intersection between these two roads is probably the second busiest on the island. The busiest, called 5 Corners because 5 roads intersect there, needs a traffic officer there all day during the summer, but is in the middle of a bustling town (the famous Black Dog Bakery is on one of the 5 corners). The other intersection is in a relatively desolate area.

For many years, this intersection had a stop sign on Barnes Road and nothing on VH-Edgartown Road. This worked fine most of the time, most of the year, but at a few peak times during the summer, it could take up to a half hour to get across if you were trying to get to Oak Bluffs, and occasionally someone would make an ill-conceived attempt to cross and would perish in a fiery crash. Years of discussion ensued, which encompassed everything from doing nothing to putting in a (horrors!) traffic light, which would have been the first on the island, and concluded with putting a blinker with a yellow caution signal on VH-E Rd. and blinking red on Barnes Rd. This accomplished exactly nothing.

Mind you, the ongoing discussion was front page news in the local paper throughout this period, and over time I came to realize that there was a determined, well-connected constituency who wanted nothing more than ensuring that traffic at the corner remained intractable and would fight anything providing even a whiff of improvement. Eventually, they hit on making the intersection a 4-way stop. This seemed to please almost everyone, because it make the whole thing fairer, I suppose, and was cheap to implement.

Only two problems remained or one problem and a corollary. The core problem is that a 4-way stop, while excellent for making people slow down in relatively low volume locations, is a stupid solution for an intersection between two busy 40 mile per hour roads. It brings everyone to a halt and completely impedes traffic flow. That's where the fairness part I mentioned before comes in, instead of one road waiting 30 minutes and the other not waiting at all, now both roads had 20 minute waits because everyone had to stop. The corollary is that people don't have a clue how to behave at 4-way stops under the best of circumstances, and waiting 20 minutes to get to the stop sign wasn't exactly the best of circumstances. So we went from occasional horrific accidents to frequent minor accidents.

In any event, I was pleasantly surprised to see the following headline in the Vineyard paper: MVC will review roundabout project planned in Oak Bluffs. Yes, they have, for the past 10 years, been planning a traffic circle for the intersection. As awful as traffic circles can be, it's a good solution for this particular problem. Traffic will move quicker because not everyone has to stop, and there are supposedly half as many accidents as at a 4-way stop. The trouble is in the first part, as the Martha's Vineyard Commission (whoever they are) now wants to know why they weren't more involved in the planning process and the people who live near the intersection are opposed to the project because it would improve traffic flow. This, apparently will make it harder for them to get in and out of their driveways. And so it goes, round and round.

Frank opts for the patdown

Today I had my first official airport patdown. We were on our way to Martha's Vineyard and had to change planes in Boston. The flight up was completely uneventful, just like you want flights to be. Smooth, on time, all that.

We walked to the neighboring terminal (Airport information agent: Easy walk. Others in my party: LONG walk) to take the little prop plane over to the Vineyard. We were laughing because I realized I'd bought bottles of water for everyone after security in Philly, but because we'd changed terminals the inside-security bottles were now outside-security bottles and I was now going to have to throw them all out to go through security again. 

Then, the TSA guy started shuttling everyone away from the metal detector and into the full body scanner. I had made up my mind previously that if faced with this that I was going to refuse and get felt up instead. Because that's just the kind of guy I am. I just figured I'd rather let somebody touch my stuff (or at least my clothes over my stuff) than take on any more radiation.

The agent seemed mildly annoyed and shunted me aside to wait for a "Male Patdown on Number 7!" I waited for several minutes until I was mildly annoyed as well at which time I started bugging him and soon a tall young man came over, picked up all my bags and my shoes and led me to the edge of the security area.

The rest of my family, who had already been quickly scanned, came over to watch and heckle. The guy told me he was going to touch my shoulders, chest, torso and legs, and that he would use the back of his hands to touch my buttocks and groin. Everyone found this all very amusing and my wife asked if she could do it too.

It was not at all uncomfortable. I told him they pat me down every time I go to a ballgame so I'm used to random guys touching me, which made him laugh. After doing the front-of-hands parts he announced that he'd be now using the backs of his hands. As he felt around, I said it reminded me of that Friends episode with Joey's tailor. Which made the TSA guy and my family laugh.

So of course he didn't find anything improper and I felt reasonably assured that if I had been carrying something improper that he would have found it. There was nothing sketchy or humiliating about it. Off to the gate we went. I guess if I was short for time this might have been a problem, but if not I can't say anything bad about the process.

Tidbits

I was flipping through the New York Times (yes, an actual newspaper) and I found an article about a computer hacker's convention. I had always thought that, while bright and creative, hackers were, you know, criminals. So I was surprised that they even had not one, but two conventions, called Black Hat and Defcon, in Las Vegas. I was joking with my daughter, saying, I wonder what kinds of panels they have at hacker conventions? It turns out, they have panels like "Meet The Federal Agent."

In fact, federal agents are openly at the convention, in part to monitor their activities, but mostly to hire them.

Later in the article, they talk about competitions. Some are actually hacking contests like in The Social Network, the others are what they call "tinkering." Lockpicking, creating beer cooling machines, and, my personal favorite, competing to tamper with tamper-resistant packaging.

I also saw and article about a new kind of day camp- social skills camp. Doesn't that sound like fun? It's like when I ask my kid what she did on her camp trip she rolls her eyes and mumbles under her breath, "teambuilding."

A little view into my former life

Here's a video done by Advertising Age, the main trade magazine of the industry, where they visit interesting agency offices. Here they visit Red Tettemer, which is located in the PNB building in Center City. The whole thing is pretty cool, and there's a mention of me around 1:50.

http://adage.com/article/agency-digs/agency-digs-pops-red-tettemer-partners/228357/

I should note that calling me a client doesn't really capture it. I worked both with Steve Red and co-founder Ed Tettemer for years first as co-workers and then hiring them to assist the agency I ran in developing major ad campaigns. They developed their initial expertise working in the cable television industry working with me. I'm really pleased to see the agency is still thriving and hasn't lost the spirit that made them such fun to work with. They're really good.

Luxury Hotel Review, including stuff that won't be on TripAdvisor

Having gone to see the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Winter's Tale on the upper east side of Manhattan, we decided to spend the night at a hotel in the area. This being a special occasion, I selected a hotel called The Mark, right off a lovely part of Madison Avenue and around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Mark is a place to stay if you are fabulous. You can be fabulously gorgeous, you can be fabulously well dressed, you can be fabulously wealthy. The Mark is a place for all of you. Why? Because everything about this hotel is fabulous. And even for people like me whose fabulousness is not easy to spot with the naked eye, it was a terrific experience.

It was about 10:30 PM when we arrived and we were met streetside by the doorman who took our bag and our car. The lobby, like everything else in the hotel is Designed. The chairs are plush and unusual in shape and shade. The reception desk is small, check-in took seconds and then the desk clerk stepped around the counter to show us to our room. I thought this was a marvelously personal touch.

Our room, which is of the kind called a Seventy-Seven King, is a step above the mere Deluxe King and below what they call a suite. It was what most people would call a suite. A large suite with 2 full rooms with a pocket door separating them and a small kitchen and 2 bathrooms.

Let's go through this in the order in which things struck me. First of all, there are enough closets that you could live there. We don't have nearly enough clothes to fill these closets. There are so many of them that the desk clerk couldn't find the safe. He checked in 3 places and then gave up and told us it was in the room somewhere. There are 4 full depth double wall closets and a walk-in with cubbies enough to fit about 100 pairs of shoes. I'm guessing all told you could hang about 1000 full wardrobes in these closets. There was also a dresser. We had one small rolling bag and felt like we'd packed far too little.

Second, to say the room is designed is an understatement. Let's just note that on the beautiful coffee table in front of the gorgeous, ultra-comfortable velvet couch in the living room is a book of all the designers who participated and all of the things they designed for the hotel. Everything has been thought about and as far as I can tell, created specifically for the hotel.

Next, we're high tech here. There is a universal remote control for all of the lights and shades in both the living room and bedroom. I didn't take the time to really get how it worked, but there were individual controls for everything anyway. There are flat screen TVs in both rooms, though the one in the living room seems significantly too small for the space. The TV has a nice preview page where you can scroll down the channels and get a small picture of what's on at the time as you go along. There's a retractable cord to attach an iPod and a Blu-Ray player for each TV. The climate control is electronic, quiet, accurate, and easy to use. Maybe the best I've ever seen.

The bed is big and comfy and the pillows are numerous and nice. There are flexible reading lights on either side. The chair and ottoman in the bedroom are the same wonderful velvet as the living room couch.

The master bathroom is gorgeous- marble walls, separate tub and stall shower with gleaming chrome fixtures and a heated towel rack. The beautiful double sink is glazed with a kind of porcelain that we've never seen before. It's creamy looking and appears as if it would almost be soft. It's wonderfully smooth to touch. There's a full medicine cabinet (full-size, not full of medicine) behind one side of the mirror, the other side of the mirror has a TV in it with a remote control on the counter. The toilets in both bathrooms are set about an inch too high, and the master seems like it should have a bidet.

The small kitchen has a full-size refrigerator with ice maker, 4 burner cooktop and a microwave. No coffee maker for some reason, and the many cabinets have almost nothing in them, just an small and odd collection of dishes, so bring your own.

So after exploring the room I decided I wanted to go out and get a snack. I called the desk and the guy spent the entire time trying to convince me not to go out. I love the attitude of these luxury hotel employees. Noting that the only thing open nearby was a place called "Hot and Crusty," his voice dripped with scorn, but then he mentioned casually that "we go there," but that I really shouldn't. So adopted scorn from the guest perspective and perfectly acceptable from his own.

Breakfast is served until 11, even on a weekday. We both had omelettes, which are the French rolled style, tender and creamy and great fillings. Good toast too, though the butter was too cold to spread on it. Good strong coffee too. The restaurant has a kind of busy decor but a beautiful huge skylight makes it very pleasant. The lobby bar is very cool-looking and was busy at 11PM.

Checkout was quick and easy. Every single person on the staff seems genuinely pleasant and helpful. This is one of the best hotels I've ever stayed in and would certainly come back if the occasion called for it.

My home town

Well, kind of. Though I'm from New York, I'm really from Brooklyn and Manhattan is what we called "The City." But I found myself awake early in a hotel on 77th and Madison and decided to go for a walk uptown.

Madison in the 60's and 70's is almost exclusively an upscale shopping street, with no aspect of real life intruding. You can shop or you can eat and if you are there you are most likely a foreign tourist. As you head uptown, though, you get more of a sense that people live there. Not people that you would normally hang out with necessarily, but people nonetheless.

The first thing you really notice is that there are no chain stores. One of the aspects of New York that has been most troubling to me over the past bunch of years is the influx of mall stores. Why would you go to New York to shop at the Gap? Nothing against the Gap, but why? But on upper Madison, unless you count the New York outposts of places like Hermes or places with flagship stores in New York that have spread elsewhere, you face a series of stores with unfamiliar names and small bakeries and cafes. This is incredibly refreshing and feels like you could be in a European city.

Starting from 77th Street, I didn't notice the first chain store until 85th street, where there was a Bath and Body Works. In the meantime, I stopped at E.A.T. by Eli Zabar to get a cup of coffee. A 10 oz cup was $2.50 ounce per ounce, about double Starbucks prices. The woman in front of me in line had taken a plastic cup of berries off the shelf, but when the cashier told her it was $14 she put it back. To put it in perspective, we ate dinner last night at JoJo, one of the finer restaurants in New York and their berries for dessert were $10.

As you move further north, the restaurants tend to be of the urban diner variety. I didn't see my first Starbucks until 95th St. It's hard to walk 20 blocks in New York without seeing one of those. After 96th, the streetscape began to change, as if someone with a blender had begun to mix in some of the rest of the world. At 99th I reached Mt. Sinai Hospital and turned around.

Walking in New York has always taken a certain amount of concentration, but it's now even more difficult because so many people are looking at their phones and not where they are walking. It's not fair for those of us paying attention to have to do all of the avoidance. But one of the things that I like about walking in New York is that, compared to less intense places, it's hard to get too inwardly focused. There's too much to see, hear and smell.

My favorite vignette along the way happened at an intersection. I noticed that as soon as I got to New York that I ceased to pay attention to traffic lights when crossing the street. It's all based solely on what's going on at street level. As I approached one corner, I saw and heard an ambulance streaking up Madison. But the light turned green on the side street and cars started across the avenue as if nothing was happening. Even a school bus. A school bus!  Halfway out into the intersection before stopping to let the ambulance by. As the bus sat there, a little girl with big glasses stared out the window at me, smiled and waved. I smiled in reply and kept smiling all the way back to the hotel.