Prom again

Tonight is the prom for my school. Being a senior class adviser, I am part of the chaperoning crew. The official starting time was 10 minutes ago. My job for the moment is to make sure nobody who has come in already tries to leave. Since there are only two people here so far, I've been doing my job with 100% success.

On the road again

Rode my bike today for the first time in a while, and really for the first time with any level of intensity this year. It's late for me to get started with this, but I found that you don't need to know exactly what a hip flexor is in order to have an injured one. Is is a muscle? A tendon? A ligament? Gristle? No matter, it's stiff sometimes and hurts sometimes and is just all-round bad company.

But today I decided I was better enough to try. On the bad side, it was so windy and there's so much crap in the air that I spent half the time rubbing stuff out of my eyes. I really should have worn ski goggles instead of sunglasses. Wouldn't that have looked awesome? On the good side, I'm reminded of why I like biking so much more than other endurance exercises like running (you never get to go "wheee!" when you run) or swimming (boring, unless you're afraid of drowning). The main attraction, aside from feeling what a cool machine a bicycle is, is seeing little vignettes along the way.

Today, I saw people trying to set up a birthday party at a playground, dealing with balloons and paper tablecloths in a 20 mph wind, and then a couple blocks away, I saw kids headed to that party. After I rode by, I was just imagining what their moms were hearing, "Do I have to go? It's cold out! It's too windy! How long do I have to stay?" Good luck to that party.

Then, a few blocks later, I saw one of these things that I'm sure was more interesting to imagine than the reality. I saw a grown man, holding a hockey stick, facing, standing across the lawn between two flags, a two year-old boy. I'm sure it wasn't what it looked like, but fun to think about.

Finally, I found myself ruminating on the people who complain about bikes using the roads. "Well, I'm not going to give them any consideration because they don't follow the rules of the road like cars do." First of all, why not give consideration because it's another person, just as a general rule? But disregarding even that fundamental guiding principle, what's the problem with bikes? Oh, I'm sorry? I don't stop at stop signs the way, oh, 0% of cars do? You're right. Just run me down right now.

The prom thing

Saturday I was a prom dad. I'm not sure what this means in other households. Here, it means my wife runs around with my daughter getting her hair, makeup dress, whatever, while I buy whatever stuff is needed, move furniture, and arrange whatever I have been told to arrange. The apogee of manual labor. Also somewhere between being a 5th wheel and a spare tire.

The whole build-up to prom is excruciating. The dress, the hair, the flowers, the shoes. All of my favorite things wrapped up into one event. Fortunately, my exalted position as prom dad keeps all that stuff safely away from me. This is good because proms in general are pretty foreign to me. When I was a senior in high school, I'd guess a quarter of the kids went to the prom. I never even really thought about going. Of course I was also an outsider and kind of a nerd, but none of my friends went, even the ones with girlfriends.

So I guess, the more things change the more they stay the same. Except now I have to devote hours to something that I'm not really involved with. This included chaperoning post-prom. As part of the Global War On Fun (tm), it is now necessary to contain high school students both before and after prom in order to prevent them from doing the kinds of things they routinely do on Saturday nights. So not only is prom night special because of prom itself, but it's the only Saturday night you don't drink or smoke weed or sit in your room playing Bioshock with your friends.

In real life, this means keeping them cooped up from an hour before the prom until 5AM, when they are presumably too tired to get into much trouble, and they are also allowed to drive with their junior licenses. The cooping, at least for my kid's school, is done at the Plymouth Township Community Center, which was done up by a dedicated group of volunteers (of which I was not one) to look as much like a beach shack in Maui as a 3-story stone and glass community center can on a budget of under $500.

So my job was to roam around the tropical paradise (better soft pretzels than in actual Hawaii!) from 2-5AM and make sure the kids weren't doing anything antisocial, or overly social, I suppose. There was some mess-making and some kids lying on each other, but more of them were hanging out, talking and, ultimately, sleeping. Time passed slowly, especially because one of the other parents would announce every minute, "74 minutes to go!" until it actually was time to go.

And then it was over. 6AM bedtime. And the end of promming for me.

In praise of Randy Newman

I've been a fan of Randy Newman's since "Sail Away," so it was nice to see him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He celebrated this honor by joining his former backup vocalist, Don Henley, who according to Newman "found some success on his own," in a rousing version of "I'm Dead, But I Don't Know It." Which is, if you're not familiar with it, a not-at-all-veiled slap at over-the-hill rockers who are still taking up stage time even when they have nothing left to offer. Perfect fodder for a crowd made up mostly of just those people.

I would have trouble naming a favorite Randy Newman song. There are just so many, from "Mama Told Me Not to Come," to "God's Song," to "Burn On, Big River" to his hits "Short People" and "I Love LA" and dozens more. Watching him and Henley sing reminded me of a version of Faust that he recorded with Henley playing Faust, Newman as the Devil, and James Taylor as the obnoxiously smug and self-satisfied God. Setting up God's character, Taylor lounges about as the angels sing his praises, and then pipes in

Folks up here, ask me why
Things go so badly down below
I tell them when they ask me why
I really do not know
(But you do know, don't you Lord?)
Of course I do! Sing it!

Angels: Oh, Lord
How great our Lord (and so on...)

It's a wonderfully warped view of the version of God that man has created. Just like Newman's wonderfully warped view of almost everything he encounters. He's a treasure.

Great moments in sports

I was out for a while this afternoon and so when I got back I was watching the last few innings of the Phillies game on the DVR. It was fun and exciting and surprising, but I felt really weird sitting here, rooting for something to happen that had actually already happened 2 hours ago. What exactly am I rooting for? Is it any different from rooting real time?

Then, I start watching the Giro d'Italia, the biggest cycling race aside from the Tour de France- all the same riders, equally difficult, and almost as prestigious. Today they were supposed to ride through the mountain passes, but they had 6 inches of snow and had to reroute the riders on the morning of the race. Even the lower parts of the mountain are in thick fog, so the helicopters are grounded and the mobile satellite dishes can't work, and none of the cameras had been set up on the new part of the course. So the announcers have literally be watching and talking over video of the finish line (where it was also snowing) since the riders hit the rerouted part of the race for an hour and a half. Every once in a while a motorcycle or some team cars come by and the crowd gets excited. But nothing happened.

Then the announcers started raising their voices and excitedly relaying information about what was probably happening just our of sight. Finally, two riders appeared out of the fog and dueled to the finish. It was one of these races where the finish is a steep uphill, and it seemed endless, but ultimately two Italians won the day's stage (the championship is based on total time over 21 days of racing) and one of them leads the overall race.

Bully for you

I drove back and forth to New York yesterday. I've done that many times in my life, and of course I lived in Manhattan with a car for several years, which is an experience I will repeat only if I can afford to garage it.

New York drivers have a well-earned reputation for aggressiveness, but most of that is really because there are so many taxi cabs and the taxis are super-agressive. I don't find driving in New York to be all that different from driving in Philadelphia. In fact, New York drivers are more respectful of pedestrians that Philadelphians, especially at corners where pedestrians have the right of way to cross and the car is trying to make a right turn.

But having a car in New York? That's a whole nother thing. All you need to know about owning a car in New York is explained by the growing popularity of a product called the Bumper Bully. The web site is quite informative, but basically, this is a thing you drape over your rear bumper to protect it from cars hitting it from behind.

Back in the day, a bumper was a steel thing that might get dented and you didn't care (nor were you much protected from bodily harm by its presence). Now bumpers are plastic and they break and tear, like other plastic and look awful when they do. They also are part of a shock absorption system that makes cars far safer than they've ever been. And they are expensive.


Just to make myself clear, you have to be absolutely crazy to keep a car New York City if you can't afford to park in the garage. Parking is subject to strict rules regulations, all of which require you to move your car with exasperating regularity. And, the demand for spots for outstrips supply. The bane of the Manhattan car owner's existence is called alternate side of the street parking. This system, sensibly designed to allow the city to clean the streets, requires you to move your car every other day. In practice, it means you can park in a space but not from 8 AM to 11 AM Monday Wednesday Friday or on the other side of the street, Tuesday Thursday or Saturday.

When I lived on the Upper West Side, I was in an 8 to 11 six day week area as I described above. Move three blocks north or five blocks south, and you enter an 11 AM to 2 PM zone. This arrangement yields a fantastical red of strategies and texting's design to allow one to keep one's car without getting ticketed or towed.

On my block, and the surrounding ones as well, the usual strategy was to move your car by 7:55 AM and double park on the other side of the street. Double parking, if you've not seen that before, means parking not next to the curb but next to another parked car. This is absolutely illegal almost all of the time except for the 8 AM to 11 AM six days a week when you were allowed to do it opposite the side on which there is no parking. So the street is transformed from having a row of parked cars on either side to having a double row on one side.

Good luck if you're parked along the curb and want to go someplace. Some people put their phone numbers on piece of paper under windshield wiper on the double parked car, but it's hardly universal. Then, at about 10:40 you go get your car, un-double park it, and move back to the other side and sit in the car until 11 AM. This is repeated every other day, Sunday not included.

So what does this have to do with the Bumper Bully, you may ask? New Yorkers as a whole are pretty adept parallel parkers. However, sometimes spots are just too small to get into comfortably. This requires a lot of back-and-forth iteration, punctuated on both ends by a slight bump against the other cars bumper. Every once in a while, you're bound to miscalculate this like to the bump becomes something slightly more. This kind of thing eventually shows up on the bumper.

In addition, sometimes people park so as to take up two spaces with one car by having it strategically in the middle. In cases like this, although it's not what one might call acceptable, it's not uncommon for somebody to come up behind another car and push them (slide them, really, since the wheels don't turn) a few feet forward in order to meet for their own car. I will admit to having done that more than once as a last resort. I also returned my car to find it not quite in the same place as where I left it the day before. These things happen.

In these kinds of situations, it's not hard to see why one might want a Bumper Bully. Just one more way technology makes our lives just a little bit better and brighter.

Don't just do something, stand there

Two nights ago, pitcher J.A. Happ was hit in the head by a batted ball really hard and had to be hospitalized. Fortunately, he seems to be fine. So now the discussion turns to how can we prevent these kinds of injuries. Especially since this is the second such incident in the past 3 years. Clearly something must be done!

I don't want to seem callous here, but there are about 2600 major league baseball games every year, and about 300 pitches thrown in each. So over 3 years, that's 2600 x 300 x 3 = 2,340,000 pitches thrown. And on two of those, people got pretty badly hurt. So on any given pitch, the chances of your being hit in the head by a batted ball and seriously injured is 1 in 1,170,000, or 0.00009%. I'll take those odds any time. I'm more at risk of serious injury making scrambled eggs or taking a shower or driving to school.

People internalize risk in funny ways. It's like being afraid to fly. There hasn't been a commercial aircraft fatality in the US in four years. There was probably a fatal accident on the Schuylkill last week. Is a pitcher in a vulnerable position? And should we make it as safe as possible, within reason? Of course, but the data would suggest that when he throws his next pitch, the ball will end up somewhere other than against his skull 1,169,999 out of 1,170,000 times. So while it may be news, it's not exactly a crisis.

Thinking ahead

I was going for a normal short bike ride this morning (short means 8-10 miles, around 45 minutes), when I was diverted from my route by an open gate, leading to the West Laurel Hill Cemetery. I live about 200 yards from that cemetery, but had never ventured inside. Today, though, the open gate looked inviting, the trees and flowers were beautiful, and in I went.

I've always liked cemeteries, in a certain distanced sort of way. I'm neither afraid of death nor wishing for it, so in my detachment I tend to observe them in an aesthetic kind of way. This is a big cemetery on a hillside, so it winds in and around and up and down, and I did not see another soul (so to speak) except for a couple of cars. So it was quiet and calm and I could observe the wide variety of ways that people decide to mark where their former bodies are buried.

Most of the gravestones were of the typical size, and had one big name, the family name I guess, and then one or more smaller ones. There were also markers that looked like benches, family crypts that looked like miniature house or churches, big pointy obelisks and a couple with windows (I didn't stop to peer in).

Some were very old world, like the Erlich stone marking a couple, where the inscription John. H. Erlich, 1874-1931, and His wife, Elizabeth. Some what sayings, like "May my life's deeds be my memory," or, less piously, "Cocktails at Six." One guy, and I'm not making this (or any of the rest of it) up, had a big crypt type thing that said, simply, George F. Browning, DDS. Yes, the thing he wanted to be remembered by was that he was a dentist. His momma would be so proud, except she's probably buried next to him.

I must admit that it makes me think a bit about how I want my entrails (remains sounds so euphemistic, don't you think?) disposed of. My favorite take on it was from the British comedy revue, Beyond The Fringe, and their bit "The English Way of Death," where one man describes how his father wanted his ashes scattered at the beach at Brighton on a holiday weekend. I might like that. I was also wondering if I could get a gravestone that's not grey. Is there a rule about that? Why not blue? Another thought is to have a tree planted above me, so that if for some reason they needed to exhume me that they'd have to untangle me from the roots first.

Hopefully, I don't have to think about this for a while. But if for some reason I do pass suddenly, people can feel free to use this post as their guidance.

New job

We got a new printer, because the old one was gradually receding into a state of complete suckiness. The document feeder doesn't work, the paper tray broke (this printer being a warranty replacement for another printer whose tray broke), and the wireless works, so you can't print on it without waking up my desktop computer. And the print quality has been degrading too. So we got a new printer, which I'm still in the process of setting up. The first thing I noticed was the warning not to drink the ink.

Okay, I've had it. Whose job is it to think up this stuff? I simply refuse to believe that anyone has cracked open one of those impenetrable plastic cartridges, found himself (yes, it would have to be a him) looking at a tempting pool of ink and then thinking, "Hmmm, should I drink this stuff? Oh, wait, there was a warning saying not to so I won't." If someone is intent on drinking the ink, they're gonna find a way, and I promise that there is no way to accidentally extract the ink (if it's even liquid- I don't know) into your mouth. So someone has to be sitting in a cubicle somewhere, trying to think of things that people could do with this printer that could ultimately lead to someone suing them.

Actually, I'd probably like that job. It would require a certain amount of mischievous destructiveness that I can relate to. Maybe I'll start thinking about warnings for all kinds of everyday objects and submit them to their manufacturers as a way of auditioning.