Don't put all your eggs...

I'm occasionally surprised by the kind of everyday math facts that people don't know. Most people (though not all) do know that there are 12 in a dozen. Not too many things are bought by the dozen: donuts, bagels (but they give you 13 usually), and of course, eggs.

I have a nice paper carton in my refrigerator with a dozen eggs in it. This drives me crazy, because I also have an egg holder in the refrigerator with exactly one egg in it. Why do I have both? Because the egg holder has exactly a dozen spaces in it. I'll give the designers of the refrigerator a break and presume that they didn't do this with the intent of irritating me, but the other alternative is that they designed the thing without thinking about how it would be used.

This is a common fault in product design, where the emphasis is on features rather than benefits. The first is about the product. The second is about the person using the product. In this case, some guy thought, "Okay, you get eggs by the dozen, so we'll put a dozen spaces in the egg holder." That's a feature. Thinking about it as a benefit you would think, "People use this to store eggs. People buy eggs by the dozen and they probably buy a new dozen before they're completely out of them so I'll put 16 spaces in the egg holder."

Not so hard, but clearly harder than it looks.

Political Spew

I had a kind of disturbing political conversation today, so I need to vent a little.

The person I was talking to said that they were concerned about Obama winning because they had Jewish friends who normally voted Democratic but would vote for McCain if Obama were elected, because they didn't think Obama would support Israel. For these people I have one calm, well-reasoned question. Have you lost your minds?

By what calculation do you think Obama wouldn't support Israel? Because he's a closet Muslim? Because his Christian preacher made some controversial remarks? Do you really think that the president of the largest democracy in the world would turn its back on its closest (maybe only) democratic ally in the middle east? By going down this road you are buying into the right-wing propaganda and their framing of the issue. You're saying that the current approach is the only one that will work. Is this true? Just look at all the wonders Bush has done for peace in the middle east. Let's have more of that, yeah! Do you really truly think that a hard line attitude is going to keep Iran in check? I can't believe that smart people can actually believe this nonsense.

And of course by voting for McCain you're buying the entire right wing package in the process. Want some more radical anti-choice judges? Pollution? Rich made richer at the expense of the middle class and poor? Accelerated global warning? Uninvestigated corruption? Increased spying on US citizens? Endless preemptive wars? The same stuff we've been getting for the last 8 years? Yay! Go for it!

All I can hope is that people who say this kind of stuff come to their senses when the actual choice is presented to them. For the moment it makes me ill.

Izzard

"Flies and locusts I understand, but frogs? Frogs are not a plague. They're just too many frogs."

"Why does 'Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's ox' make it into the top 10 laws of the world? What's wrong with that? You see that ox over there? I'm not going to kill it. I'm not going to steal it. I just really, really want it."

Ha

I just saw Eddie Izzard perform and my whole body aches from laughing so hard. The man is a genius.

Yankee Stadium

I was at the Yankee game yesterday and I have a few observations.

1. Yankee Stadium is a shrine and they should never even dream of tearing it down.

2. Yankee Stadium is a dump and the sooner they demolish it, the better.

3. You can buy a beer that costs $12.50 at Yankee Stadium.

4. They really ought to have somebody there selling sunscreen. The weather was much sunnier than predicted and I got toasted.

5. Apparently, it's not important that you be able to walk all the way around the stadium at the end of the game. It's preferable to have a fence in the middle so that if you try to walk from the first base side to the third base side you find yourself crushed into a dead end.

6. New Yorkers can whine about almost anything.

7. You can move away from New York for 20 years and still remember how to work your way through a crowd around the stadium and in the subway.

Odd

We have an Irish cleaning person and she has a very thick accent that sometimes makes her very hard for me to understand, but when she writes something down it looks just like regular English. Just how does that work?

Gone in 90 Seconds

The last 2 days were oddly reminiscent of the Asheville trip, in that there was lots of fuss in the run up to travel, but everything ended up being pretty much routine. I went to Connecticut to see my mom and dad. My train was at 9:18 and I normally leave the house at around 7:40, drop my daughter at 8, and get home around 8:20. I expected to stop home and organize myself, then head to the station, but I grabbed the important stuff as I left, just in case. As it turned out, today was a case. Lincoln Drive had several accidents on it, which led to delays in both directions and assorted traffic going everywhere trying to detour. As a result, we didn’t get to school until 8:20, but I wasn’t worried because I still had an hour and I could have walked to the station in an hour.

Needless to say, it was impossible to get back to the city, and as I headed toward the last refuge of the vehicularly challenged, Germantown Avenue, at 8:50, I called Amtrak and changed to a later train. Then the miraculous happened and the traffic disappeared and I was suddenly sailing toward the station at 9. At this point, I’m in serious grumble mode, because I know I’m going to arrive at the parking lot at around 9:12 and be in time to either just make or just miss the train. So I figure I’ll call Amtrak, wait on hold for a few minutes, and by the time I get an agent I’ll be there and know whether or not I’m on time.

As I write this it sounds preposterous, because it is, but it actually worked. I pulled into the parking lot and just as I crossed over to the station an agent picked up, as I entered the station at 9:15. Changing the reservation was delayed because he misunderstood the spelling of my name, but it got changed over at 9:17 and I got my tickets and as Iwalked down the stairs to the platform I could see the train was pulling into the station. I am not exaggerating at all.

Oh, and by the way, traffic reports suck.

Then on the way home, I get a late start and feel like I have a very slight chance of making my return train, so I call Amtrak once again and ask if I should change reservations again, but they say there’s plenty of space on the next 2 trains and to just do it at the ticket office. Plus the train is running 3 minutes late. I rush to Stamford. I know that every Amtrak train to Stamford is 5 minutes late. I think this is because they routinely schedule a commuter train at the same time as the Amtrak one and they don't want them to bump into each other. So I’m closing in on the station and I see that it’s 5 minutes past train time, and again go into grumble mode, but then I look at my cell phone and see that the clock in the car is 5 minutes fast. I drop off my car, sprint up to the ticket office, which looks closed. I peer around a curtain and see a woman reading a book. It’s the ticket agent. She says, don’t worry, you still have a couple of minutes. I get my ticket, go down to the track, and this time the train appears as I take my place on the platform.

So it was all routine. I made 2 trains with a combined total of about 90 seconds to spare, but I’m home.

Education in the news

My father pointed out to me an article in the New York Times about a Korean school where pretty much all the kids go to Ivy League schools and average over 2200 on SATs. He somewhat halfheartedly seemed to be suggesting that there was some merit in their approach. Here's the article, but to summarize it's about 2 elite schools where the students do pretty much nothing but work for 6 AM until at least midnight every day.

Honestly, I find the whole thing disgusting. Aside from the 17 hour days that these kids put in, the focus on Ivy League as a brand name that's desirable as a something to affirm your sense of self worth is almost as disturbing. I've got nothing against hard work. I demand it of my students and of myself, but this just seems wrongheaded in every way. Is this the point of education? Maybe I'm missing a subtext that Korea is a place one wants to escape and that this is an ideal way to do so. Or maybe you can argue that this is kids' work, to do nothing but study until they are old enough to do other work. You can argue that, but you'll never get me to agree.

The article features an admission by the headmaster at one of the elite schools that American schools probably do a better job at educating the whole person, as opposed to pure academics, and I guess this is the point. What is the objective of the schooling exercise? Let's keep in mind that schools serve no present positive purpose (I know people do research at schools, but that's not what I'm talking about). Schools are a classic investment model, where you invest early to achieve desired returns later. I think that with these kids, the desired returns are new doctors and lawyers and university professors. This is a reasonable goal, but I don't think I want any of these types of people teaching or protecting the health and livelihood of my own kids.

One of my frat mates was a guy who studied night and day because he was determined to be a doctor. Watching him, we all thought about what a nightmare it would be if you found yourself in the emergency room one night and this guy was your doctor, because we knew that outside of academics, the guy was an idiot. If you were choosing a professor for your English Literature course, would you pick the one who had spent her whole life studying and practicing for tests and keeping her academic performance at the highest echelon and so had impressive degrees? Or would you prefer the one who took a year off after high school to kayak across the Amazon? Who will be better equipped to put material in context? Let me wrap up with some David Byrne lyrics:

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what you want them to...

...Facts are getting the best of us
Facts are nothing on the face of things.

Life has facts, but life is context. Sorry to borrow insight again, but in A Fish Called Wanda, Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) insults Otto (Kevin Kline), calling him an ape. "Apes don't read Nietzsche!" he replies and she retorts,"Yes they do, they just don't understand it." The world needs people who understand things, not people who know things.

Rambling Man

Today was oddly reminiscent of the Asheville trip, in that there was lots of fuss in the run up to travel, but everything ended up being pretty much routine. I went to Connecticut to see my mom and dad. My train was at 9:18 and I normally leave the house at around 7:40, drop my daughter at 8, and get home around 8:20. I expected to stop home and organize myself, then head to the station, but I grabbed the important stuff as I left, just in case. As it turned out, today was a case. Lincoln Drive had several accidents on it, which led to delays in both directions and assorted traffic going everywhere trying to detour. As a result, we didn’t get to school until 8:20, but I wasn’t worried because I still had an hour and I could have walked to the station in an hour.

Needless to say, it was impossible to get back to the city, and as I headed toward the last refuge of the vehicularly challenged, Germantown Avenue, at 8:50, I called Amtrak and changed to a later train. Then the miraculous happened and the traffic disappeared and I was suddenly sailing toward the station at 9. At this point, I’m in serious grumble mode, because I know I’m going to arrive at the parking lot at 9:12 and be in time to either just make or just miss the train. So I figure I’ll call Amtrak, and it takes them a long time to get a live person on the phone, and by the time I get an agent I’ll be there and know whether or not I’m on time.

As I write this, it sounds preposterous, because it is, but it actually worked. I pulled into the parking lot and just as I crossed over to the station an agent picked up, as I entered the station at 9:15. Changing the reservation was delayed because he misunderstood the spelling of my name, but it got changed over at 9:17 and I got my tickets and walked down the stairs to the platform as the train pulled into the station.

Oh, and by the way, traffic reports suck.

My visit to North Carolina

Whenever we set off to go anywhere, my late, great friend Richard would always announce in faux Evening News tones, “What began is a simple trip to the grocery store ended in tragedy today for two youths whose car jumped the guardrail and plunged"… or some such thing. I never take a safe trip for granted.

So here’s my report on the trip, picking up from my fun at the PHL airport.

Got to Greenville-Spartanburg airport, right next to the BMW factory. They have a visitor center, but I skipped it. My favorite sign along the way was on a truck for Ingles Supermarket. It featured a picture some tortilla chips with smiling faces on them, and the words, “Nacho typical supermarket.” I have no idea what they’re getting at.

My friend Bennett is a lanky fellow with reddish blonde hair and a large and distinctive beard. He hangs wallpaper for a living and is married to the math chairman at the local college. We met working at day camp at our local town park and became fast friends over mutual enjoyment of sports and music, and he’s a person that it has always made me feel good to be around. He is a voracious reader and the walls of their house are filled with books in every room except the kitchen (actually, I didn’t see their bedroom but I’m guessing there are books there too).

Asheville is a terrific small city in the mountains of western North Carolina. It was built up mostly in the early 20th century and has many fine art deco buildings. The downtown is almost completely free of chain stores and features lots of galleries and restaurants and music clubs, tucked in among the occasional office building. I’m not really sure what the economy is based on, but there are a couple of colleges and lots of college students and street musicians milling around, even on a weekday night.

My one full day there we went to a place called Chimney Rock Park. A couple of pillars separated off from a palisade and created a striking skyline overlooking a lake. You can hike from the bottom of the palisade or drive to a parking lot or take an elevator (!) to the top. We climbed, of course. It’s about 1/3 mile vertically and between 2 and 3 trail miles featuring a memorable number of wooden steps. After you get to the rock, you can hike along the top to a waterfall and cool yourself off in the stream before it plunges over the edge. We wondered how the fish got up to these little pools up on top of a rocky ridge 2000 feet above the main river below.

Then you go down 100 feet or so and make your way along the face of the palisade with sheer rock above and below. Very cool. Then the long but easier climb down. This is a place well worth visiting if you’re ever looking for a weekend getaway. There’s a nice lake a mile away and beautiful country everywhere.


Dinner and a long night of talking about all kinds of things followed. It’s rare that I get the chance to relax and open up. I guess it’s rare for everyone. I was sad to leave the next day, but it was well worth making the trip.

BFF

I just completed a visit to Asheville, North Carolina (actually in a small town outside) visiting my best friend from high school and his wife, whom I have known since she was in high school. It’s a little freaky to think you’ve known someone for 37 years and I’ve probably only seen them a half dozen times in the last 10 years. It is, however, very comforting to spend the time together and realize that you are still on the same wavelength and still simpatico after such a long time (I haven’t seen them since my 50th birthday, 2 ½ years ago). This is the first time I’ve come down here to see them, as opposed to their coming to see me, and the first time it’s been just us, as opposed to being part of a group.

Friendship can be a funny thing as an adult. You make friends easily as a kid, but it gets harder as you get older and your lives become more separate from those of your peers. You really have to make an effort, and I don’t feel like I really make that effort often enough. I’m not anti-social, but I’m not very social either, and I don’t spend nearly as much time with friends as I’d like to.

Travel Day

I know that people write lots of stuff about airports, but for someone who is easily amused they provide oodles of entertainment. I’m traveling solo today, a rarity now but extremely common back in the day, and I’m glad, because I rushed around enough to totally muddle my brain and allow me to do pretty much everything wrong on my way in.

First, I didn’t check the gate, so I parked at the absolute worst terminal. I could have moved, but I’ve heard so many horror stories about security lines that I decided not to. I had to go from Terminal B to Terminal F, which are about 2 letters apart. I thought I’d just walk my bags over there, but as soon as I went through security I was reminded that I’d brought a bottle of wine as a “come with” gift, and you can’t bring that through security because…well, because I don’t know, but you can’t. So the security agent led me back out through security (the line is much shorter in that direction, by the way) and suggested I check my bag downstairs while comforting me by telling me that what I did wasn’t nearly as stupid as the guy who had a $500 handgun in his bag and had it confiscated a few days ago.

I checked my bag and went through security again, got some coffee and decided to walk to terminal F, but the sign on the walkway said I’d have to clear security again when I got to terminal F, and I really didn’t want to take my shoes off again, so I took the shuttle bus. It’s a huge bus, plenty big enough for me and the other woman and the driver, and almost, but not quite, too big to maneuver around the airport. When you take the shuttle bus you get a close-up view of the workings of an airport. We passed what looked like a huge dome tent that had a complicated-looking bag belt. I imagined my poor bag trying to navigate it. Then we passed a large locked bin with a sign that said Satellite Accumulation Area, and I was not able to conjure up any idea of what might have been accumulated inside it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t satellites, though.

Finally at Terminal F, I find a place to plug in my laptop (hint: think like a cleaning person), but find that it’s $7.99 for Internet access. Awful. So this is being post-posted.

Arrived safe and sound in Greenville-Spartanburg, SC, where they have free Internet access.

Naycation

This is the least vacationy vacation ever. Kids are in school, so I can't sleep in. Busy all weekend. Not much relaxation. Actually, I'm going to visit friends in North Carolina for a couple of days, so that should be a nice respite. Maybe I'll get some sleep too.

I heard the best thing ever on the radio today. A woman called in to a sports talk show and said it always drove her crazy how some kids would blink and flinch when the ball came at them, so when she had a baby she bought a foam rubber ball and once the baby could sit up she started regularly throwing it at his head, so that he'd get used to it. Isn't that brilliant? I bet this could work for other things too. Maybe you could condition your kid to not be afraid of bugs and snakes and things like that by surrounding him with them from the day he was born. Of course, it's hard to know in advance if you're getting them used to it or scarring them for life, but what the heck. People are funny.

Chaos

Edward Lorenz died a couple of days ago. If you thought that the only contribution a meteorologist could make to the world was reminding you to take an umbrella to work, Lorenz is proof otherwise. You've probably never heard of him, but you're aware of his work. Here's a short version of the story:

Lorenz was running a weather simulation programs on a computer. At one point, he wanted to take one of his earlier simulations and re-run it for a longer period. This was 1961 and computers were pretty feeble, so he had to reenter all the data. A couple days into the simulation, the weather pattern of the 2nd run diverged and took a completely different pattern from the first. It should have been identical. In trying to find out why it wasn't, Lorenz re-checked his numbers and found that the printouts he used to re-run the model had rounded the data to 3 decimal places, while the original data input was to 6 decimal places. Even though the change was less than .1%, this was enough to completely change the results (there's a rounding lesson in here, BTW). Further exploration led him to postulate the so-called "Butterfly Effect," that it was impossible to accurately predict long-term weather because a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could ultimately lead to a tornado in Texas.

These findings led to an entire area of scientific exploration called chaos theory. Aside from demonstrating that it would be impossible to accurately predict weather (you'd need to know an infinite number of inputs simultaneously), it extends to any complex system (so pretty much everything in nature) in that small changes can cause significant and unpredictable results.

So if you think your life is chaotic, this is the guy you can thank for it. Not really, but if we wonder why it's so hard to really understand relatively things, Lorenz is one of the people who can give us insight.

Debate

I didn't watch the so-called debate tonight. I just saw clips and read excerpts. From what I could see, this debate was to debate what reality TV is to reality. Somewhat related, but not in any substanitive way. Flag pins? Weather Underground? Who cares?

To me, this underscores why Clinton needs to drop out of the race. Not because she isn't a good candidate. She is, but statistically she can't win, and it's going to be hard enough for a Democrat to win in the current vapid, right-wing-dominated media environment without them bashing each other (although it's mostly Clinton bashing Obama) using Republican talking points.

A few random thoughts

Until recently, I was unaware that it was possible for a person to ride a bicycle for 18 miles and whine the entire time.

Tax day is always like a little party at the post office, except for the actual party part. It's a remarkably cheerful scene around here. If you go down to the main post office at 30th street, there's live remotes from radio stations and all kinds of promotional stuff going on, and it's open until midnight, so the good times just keep on coming.

The biggest marketing event of the year is in progress now. I'm speaking, of course, about the Starbucks relaunch. Starbucks is a business classic tale of success leading to overexpansion leading to decline. In all of these stories at some point someone notices that something's gone off the rails and frantically tries to get the company back on track. That's what's going on with them now and we won't know if it'll help for many months. At the moment, all I know is that they're ditching the green logo on the cups (are they going to make their signs brown too? Ugh.) and everything has the word "fresh" on it. We'll eventualy see if there's a strategy behind this or if they're trying out lots of unrelated things to see what works, though that's usually a recipe for disaster.

Brooklyn again

We went to see our friends in Brooklyn again. They had blankets this time (apparently, their daughter had used them to make a large tent in her room last time), but it was pretty warm anyway. Park Slope is a great area. I think I lived there briefly, and I went to school there for kindergarten and first grade. We went out to buy some food for dinner and I held my friend's dog while he went into the cheese shop. Really first class people watching, with the classic New York scene of two guys walking along the street, hair, face and arms completely painted, one in tiger stripes and the other in rainbow tie-die. Of course, nobody even gives them a glance as they walk by. What a city.

The play we saw, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, is an apartheid era South African play, which I first saw in London in 1974. It was more powerful back then, with apartheid still in effect (it didn't begin to change until the late 1980s) and Nelson Mandela in jail (again, until the late '80's). It's a bit of a relic now, but still an interesting study in what makes up one's identity. A quick synopsis: an illiterate black man, Sizwe Bansi leaves a dessert town where there are no jobs to try to get work in the nearest city. He lacks a permit to work there, and the police stamp his "dom book" (internal passport) that he must return to his home. Before leaving he goes out drinking with an acquaintance and they happen upon a dead body in an alley. They take his dom book, which has the proper work permit. So Sizwe must decide if he wants to stay and work, but give up his identity, or go home. And it's funny!

Identity is always a tricky area to tread into. I have no attachment to my name at all- I don't think it's really part of me. So what constitutes my identity? Is it what people think of me? I'd hate to think that the essence of one's self is externally imposed. And on at least some level I don't really care what most people think about me, because I'm pretty sure that most people don't spend any time thinking about me.

Is it what I think about myself? We all know our share of people with a pretty significant disconnect between what they think of themselves and the kind of person that they really are. Is it a kind of objective judgment of your actions? Your intentions? Your upbringing? The moral choices you make? I've chosen to try to be a particular type of person and have figured out a pretty consistent way that I think I can accomplish that. But I'm naturally kind of introspective and I was a psychology major and had my share of therapy years back, so maybe I'm better equipped than most to create an identity for myself.

So how about everyone else? I have no idea what constitutes identity to even my closest friends. Do they even think about it? It's not the kind of thing you discuss over dinner. So I guess the play was worthwhile if it got me thinking this way.

Voice Mail

As long as I've been using voice mail and its prehistoric ancestor, the answering machine, it's still a little odd to call your house and have yourself answer the phone. And before you say that that's ridiculous, everybody knows it's just a recording, then why do 90% of the people who leave messages do so as if they're talking to me? There's nothing wrong about any of this, it's just not natural, that's all.

Politics

The most interesting aspect of the campaign to date (putting aside the astonishing fact that the Democratic nominee will be either a black man or a woman) is the discovery that evangelical Christians are not this monolithic force that's concerned solely with abortion and gay rights. There's a front page article in today's Inquirer that mirrors what I'd heard from other sources, that younger evangelicals, though concerned with abortion and gay rights, are more focused on poverty, health care and the environment, saying that these are really more important parts of Jesus' teachings. I always wondered about this; why, when Christian doctrine is so rich and diverse and potentially such a force for good, that it's been hijacked by a few people with big microphones and political ambitions. It looks like the pendulum may start to swing the other way. We may have President Bush to thank for this, with his wearing his Christianity on his sleeve and while promoting policies that are contrary to the most important parts of Chritianity. We'll have to see.

Music Question

How does a band keep its vitality? I was listening to an ad on XM for an R.E.M. special where they’ll play songs from their new album. I was a little late to catch on to R.E.M., but at their peak they were pretty special. “Automatic for the People” is one of my favorite albums. But it’s clear from their last couple of releases and listening to the little clips on the show that they have nothing new to offer. It’s a conundrum. You’re good because you have a unique sound, but after a while you have to evolve or die, and evolution is fraught with peril. If you change too much, you run a real risk of losing what made you attractive in the first place and you turn off your most ardent fans. But what happens far more often is a kind of incremental change, where I’m sure the band really feels like they’re doing something new but within a familiar milieu. Unfortunately, to even a discriminating listener it all starts to sound the same. R.E.M. is dealing with exactly that. The differences are so subtle as to seem nonexistent, although I’m sure R.E.M. feels otherwise.

It’s a rare artist who escapes this trap. Prince and Paul Simon come to mind, but even bands for the ages like the Rolling Stones or megastar singer-songwriters like Bruce Springsteen start to sound recycled after a while. Prince has proven to be an absolute master at reinventing himself, aided by the prolific volume of material he creates. From what I know about him, he has hundreds of songs to chose from for any album. Paul Simon, who’s been around a lot longer, has managed to adapt his sound to a number of styles that are distinctly unlike his own. “Graceland,” which he created while immersing himself in South African music, is a masterpiece because he miraculously manages to fuse his own subtle wit and ear for a hook with the joy and soul and exuberance of South Africa.

So I’ve asked the question, but I don’t feel like I’m anywhere close to an answer. Aside from both being very short it's hard for me to come up with anything Prince and Paul Simon have in common.

Prom

I never went to a prom when I was in high school. I usually blame this on our moving when I was in 10th grade, leaving me to try to establish myself socially with a bunch of kids who’d known each other since first grade. But the truth is that I was too shy and introspective to ask anyone, including one girl that I actually liked who clearly wanted me to ask her. Don’t ask me to explain why; I don’t know, it’s a mystery. I had a girlfriend that I met in the temple Youth Group when I was in 10th grade, but she moved to Chicago and I ended up sitting both the junior and senior proms out. I hung out with a group that was nerdy enough that most of them didn’t go either, so it wasn’t completely devastating, but the fact that I remember details makes one think that it felt significant.

Back to Blogging

There's an old fable about a frog and a scorpion. The scorpion wants to cross a river but can't swim, so he asks a frog. The frog say, "No way, you'll just sting me and I'll die." The scorpion says, "That's ridiculous, if I sting you I'll drown, so what are you worried about." The frog mulls it over and decides he'll give the scorpion a ride. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. "Why did you do that", says the frog as they begin to sink, "now we'll both die." The scorpion replied, "It's my nature." (BTW, extra points for telling me what movie that story figures prominently in- no, it's not a Disney)

A lot of old sayings are pretty annoying, whether or not there is any truth in them. I always found myself particularly irritated by "Tis better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." I suppose there's nothing wrong with preferring to have some light, but what's the point of cursing darkness? Darkness is dark; that's what it is, and cursing something for its essential nature is just stupid. I find myself walking out of the classroom muttering something about the f-ing chalk all over my hands, but chalk is chalky. If it doesn't get on your hands, it's probably not going to do such a hot job on the blackboard. Can't blame paper for the mess on my desk either.

Live Your Life

My daughter was complaining about all the ads on the Tivo screen so I took a quick look. One of them said, "The dishes can wait. Life can't." It's a car ad of some sort, for something called a Sequoia, which must be a big kind of car because sequoia is a big kind of tree.

This is a small example of the perniciousness of advertising and the way it creates the wants, needs and dissatisfactions that make you want to go out and buy something. In six words this ad communicates that the humdrum stuff isn't what life is about, that the important thing is to drive around in a large car and "live." The clear implication is that washing the dishes is not "living." Well, I've got news for you folks, washing the dishes is a lot closer to "living" than happily driving around in large motor vehicle. The suggestion that you should be feeling less than alive if you're washing dishes and that you should be yearning for the freedom a Sequoia supposedly brings you is not a positive message. If people are waiting for the moment when they can feel completely free and unfettered in order to be happy, well, that's a sure-fire ticket to unhappiness.

Life is not merely the sum of its parts, or at least to me it isn't. It's a continuum and it's comprised of all the moments, humdrum or not, and to suggest otherwise is simply deceptive. Maybe washing the dishes isn't the most thrilling part of your day, but that's okay, every day needs a least exciting part. How else would you recognize the exciting parts? The key to happiness, as I see it, is to get the maximum happiness from everything. Clearly there are things that are richer in happiness (or satisfaction or whatever you want to call it) than others, but if you can get some sort of pleasure out of washing the dishes, or walking the dog, or even getting in your new Sequoia and driving your kid in rush hour traffic to visit her friend in Upper Gwynned, then you've got a chance to enjoy living.

Post-Purim Fun

Now when we watch American Idol we use the gragger whenever Simon talks.

Neighborhood News

The music teacher/possible drug dealer across the street moved out! Very mysterious. I got home from work on Friday and there were moving vans. I'm not sure if they'd bought the house or just renting it. I never met anyone who lived there. That feels kind of weird.

Advertising 101

Somehow, the combination of recent happenings and seeing a young woman perform the song from the Apple Macbook Air commercial reminded me of an important lesson I learned in 20 years in advertising: Understand your target audience. I learned this lesson both professionally and personally, and I'll go over the professional part here.

Before you start to advertise you need to be sure who it is you're talking to. First of all, for whom does the product solve a problem? Problems come in all shapes and sizes:

• I'm hungry or thirsty
• Something hurts
  
• Something's dirty
  
• I'm leaking somewhere or something is inappropriately growing on or falling off me
  
• Something smells bad
  
• I desperately want to appear cool

Actually, that pretty much covers it. Anyway, you have to frame the problem in a way that's relevant to whoever's going to buy the product, and speak to them in a way that they will relate to and help them understand that the product will solve their problem.

For example, if you sell sports cars and want to appeal to middle aged men, you can't speak to them the same way you would if you sell children's vitamins and want to appeal to new parents. In one case, you'd use adjectives and scenery that represent things that are pretty universally found to be cool by 40-somethings, like driving along the Pacific Coast (connotes freedom), bypassing city traffic (connotes power) or a beautiful woman (connotes, well, you know). In the other, you'd want everything to focus on nurturing, optimism, caring for those unable to care for themselves. What's fun about working on this stuff is that the same people can be in both targets. I had a new kid when I was 38. And you have to sort out what's the right way to talk to the same person about different things in different ways.

What does this have to so with anything? Communication is a multi-part process. You say or do something and someone else receives it in their own way, which may not be what you're expecting if you haven't thought about it in advance.

Reality

I'm not a big fan of reality TV. Actually, I'm not such a huge fan of reality itself, much less the made for TV version. But I've got to say the "Redneck Wedding" show where the bride takes the bridesmaids to K-Mart to get camouflage gear for their bridesmaids clothes and they all tell her how good it looks. Well, I've got nothing to say. My wife and her friends used to have "worst bridesmaid's dresses" parties from time to time. My favorite one was a pink frilly thing my wife wore to a wedding in Albany (I'll tell the whole story some other time) that made her look like a 5 year-old going to her first fancy party.

Nothing Funny

This is depressing. In 1986, I got married and we took our honeymoon in Alaska. One of the high points of the trip was a day cruise from Valdez into Prince William Sound, where we saw seals and eagles and all other manner of wildlife in a icy, pristine environment. We also saw the oil terminals and heard about how important they were to the local economy.

It was a crushing blow for us when, a bit more than 2 years later, the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled around 11 million gallons of oil into the sound, blackening a place that I remember quite clearly as almost blindingly white. I remember holding the newspaper and crying.

I can't say I have the same affection for Tibet that I have for Alaska. Our trip there was uncomfortable and occasionally downright unpleasant, and though it was fascinating to be surrounded by this totally Buddhist vibe, I never felt like part of it. Still it's pretty disconcerting to open the New York Times and see a photo taken from a place where I remember standing for a long time waiting for our guide to meet us, and see overturned cars and smoke coming from a neighborhood that we spend hours wandering around. It's an ancient area and I'm sure, like Prince William Sound, it's irrevocably changed- damaged old buildings eventually to be replaced by ugly Chinese concrete boxes.

The Chinese are blaming the Dalai Lama and his followers. Though I know there are two sides to every story (for instance, I have no doubt that some of the protesters are targeting Chinese-owned business for burning, as is alleged), I've read more than a little about the Dalai Lama and as passionate as he is about Tibetan independence, I refuse to believe that he would ever advocate violence as a means of achieving it. The whole thing sucks.

To the compendium of bad vibes, let's add the collapse of Bear Stearns, where a long-time friend of mine has worked for many years. This whole mortgage industry collapse is a nightmare that will continue to unfold, and not pleasantly, for months if not years. An economist whose blog I read refers to the house of cards that is the so-called subprime mortgage industry as the Big Sh-tpile, and though that's an evocative and accurate term, the whole thing makes me think of the coal mining towns in the Appalachians.

If you've seen the movie October Sky, or better yet, Matewan, you have an small idea of the crushing effects of having a single entity control an entire town. Miners were paid in housing credits and scrip for the company stores, making it all but impossible to save enough money to leave to find a different, possibly better life. And if the company went out of business you were screwed. In the modern age, money has no inherent value, it's all just a bunch of computer coding of credits and debits, so we're all just living a in big company town. Any wonder people are buying gold?

Presumably the "company," being the global economy, is big enough to weather this shock, but that won't stop it from hurting lots of people.

Pranks Anyway

For reasons that are clearly beyond my feeble brain, the school permits, almost sanctions, a senior prank day. It's always annoying, which is the point I suppose, but this year it was beyond annoying. I'm not a big fan of a "kitchen sink" approach to most anything, and pranks are no exception. Pick a theme and go with it, don't throw in every semi-funny idea that somebody comes up with. The unfunny stuff pretty much canceled out the clever parts.

It was also pi day, 3/14, so we had pie in math class today. It worked out very nicely, because we were talking about direct and inverse variation, and I could point out that there was an inverse relation between the number of students in a class and how much pie each one got, and nobody even groaned at me about it, maybe because they were too busy eating.

I just heard a Jonas Brothers song on the radio. Eeeew. I know that pop music is by definition emotionally manipulative crap, but please. You may be trying (really really really hard) to sound heartfelt, but you're a Disney boy band. Fortunately, it was followed by Low by that Florida guy. That song's almost as much fun as Rompe, which is saying a lot.

Those of you who know me are aware of my low opinion of the current popular music, and I don't want to go on about it too much, but here is my paraphrase version of every rap song

I am good-looking
You are good looking, especially your rear end
You dance
I am somewhere else watching you dance
I want to have sex with you
I know you really want to have sex with me too even though you aren't saying so
I really do like your rear end

Yawn.

Some other time I'll give my paraphrase of every Rihanna/Beyonce song, which along with rap constitutes 80% of what's on the radio.

Genius and Genuardis

Saturday night I saw what was billed as a dance show at Annenberg Center. It was the Nikolais /Louis Dance Company. The first piece, a 1965 composition called Tent was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. I can't really even describe it, though there was a review in Saturday's Inquirer. I think there were 10 dancers and a large round piece of parachute cloth with a hole in the middle. The "score" was all experimental synthesizer sounds (Alwin Nikolais bought the first Moog Synthesizer, which was the first commercially available music and sound synthesizer ever made) and the lighting looked like a Jackson Pollack painting, in different colors depending on where the dancers were on the stage. The used the cloth as a tent (duh), a place to change costumes, a costume for 5 dancers, and piece of scenery that dancers moved around and through. I've never seen anything like it. The guy was obviously as much a production designer as a choreographer and an absolute genius at it.

Sunday morning, against my better judgment, I went to Genuardis. All I can say about that store is that it makes me think in something like Dr. Seuss language, specifically, "I hate this store with a hateful hate." And no, I'm not prone to lapsing into Seuss talk, but I really do despise it. Why, you may ask, and why do you even care about a supermarket? I happen to really like supermarket shopping. I have since I was a kid and that had a lot to do with my choosing advertising as a career. But back to Genuardis...

Setting aside the fact that there prices are generally higher than the other supermarkets,

1. They have been reorganizing and/or renovating since the day Safeway bought them. The latest took all the produce racks and turned them at an angle so the pointy side faces you as you walk up. This is bad feng shui. Nobody likes walking at something pointy. And there's no logic to where things are. Maybe garlic tastes good with tomatoes but every other supermarket in the country puts garlic next to the onions.
2. I'm sure some guy in headquarters walks around muttering about "maximizing shelf space utilization" or something like that, and the way they've chosen to increase their shelf space is to stick shelves in the middle of the aisles. I wonder if this guy puts a sofa in the middle of his hallway at home, in order to maximize sitting utilization. If you can't get through it easily with a shopping cart, it's not a functional aisle.
3. They have a computer terminal at the entrance to order your deli items. You spend a couple of minutes there, do the rest of your shopping, then you go to the deli and they say "Oh, we haven't done that yet. Wait until I'm done waiting on this person her and I'll take care of you." To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, taking the order is the easy part, it's filling the order that's hard.

There's more (candy in 4 different places), but not worth the effort. And I understand that these are but minor annoyances that should not be filling my heart with fury. The thing is, my goal when I go to the supermarket is to get everything I need in as little time as possible, preserving my leisure time for, well, it doesn't matter what I want to save it for, I just know I don't want to spend it waiting for some guy to figure out what kind of toilet paper to buy (and why are there so many kinds of toilet paper anyway?) because there's a display of english muffins in the middle of the aisle and I can't get around him.

I don't know what the people in charge are thinking, and considering the constant changes, somebody is thinking of something, but it's not genius.

Falutin

My daughter was in The Music Man recently and continues to watch the movie regularly, and I guess because the songs have worked their way into my subconscious, I described something as being "highfalutin." It's one of those words that everyone knows what it means but nobody really knows anything about. It is not from "highfaluting,"it can also be spelled hifalutin, and there is no lowfalutin or even a falutin. The dictionary says the word's root is the verb "flute," which verb I am not familiar with. I suppose the world has survived without gruntled or sheveled, so it can survive withut falutin too

New Neighbors

Not so new, really. They moved in across the street this summer. I've never spoke with them, though a young boy waved to me from the backyard once. Here's what I know about them:

• They have an orange Honda Element that they spend a lot time cleaning.
• Young people carrying oddly shaped bags come and go frequently, indicating either music lessons or drugs (which could explain the obsessive car cleaning)
• Two boys live there and they have a BB gun, which does not endear them to me.
• Their lights are on late at night.
• I haven't seen a female living there.
• They have a wireless network that I can use when ours isn't working.

It was almost a year before I met the other neighbors across the street and now we get along very nicely, so I'm not worried.

I remember when I was a kid my grandparents had a store in Brooklyn, and across the street from the store was a Strauss Tires store. I never thought much about it because kids tend not to think too much about tires. My father mentioned to me once that in all the years he lived there he never once saw someone come out of that store with tires. When I was around 12, the cops came and closed the store and the next day there was an article in the newspaper about the police breaking the largest illegal gambling operation in Brooklyn.

My Watch

I ran over my watch today. When I say this to people they seem very concerned and confused until I tell them that I wasn't wearing it at the time. It still works, and I now have that special fondness that people get for things of theirs that have been through some kind of trauma.

I had a car for several years, a 1974 Dodge Dart, that was like that. The Dart was a venerable Dodge model and had a kind of engine called a "slant 6," which had a reputation for lasting for a very long time. Unfortunately, 1974 was the first year that they started putting pollution controls on cars and they didn't work very well, so if you tried to accelerate too quickly it would just stall. This made left turns more exciting than you really want them to be, and going up hills was always a challenge, but I got used to it after a while.

The Dart drove across the country and back twice with me in the mid 1970's. The second time, it was involved in a head-on collision right near Mt. Ranier in Washington. It was neither the Dart's fault nor mine, and nobody was really hurt. The Dart's left front fender was bent so as to wrap around the wheel, so the local mechanic pulled it back a bit and said to take it to a dealer. We did, after driving from Washington to Santa Cruz, California. The steering column was bent, so if you turned the steering wheel all the way to the left it would just stay there and you could ride around in circles. The dealer said it would take longer to fix than we had time for, so we drive it all the way back to New York, a semi-wreck. Lots of interested glances on the interstates later, we made it unscathed, and I fondly kept the car for another year before passing it along to my brother, with whom it went to Colorado until he totaled it and left it to die under a 12-foot snow drift in 1987. But even then it lived on, because that winter we got a call from the Brooklyn police to saying the car had been used in a bank robbery. We said, no, the car is under 12 feet of snow in Vail. When the snow melted we saw the license plates were gone, and soon so was the Dart.

More Housecleaning

I'm definitely improving in my cleaning skills, but there's one thing I don't get. Every toilet cleaner commercial talks about cleaning under the rim, and every toilet brush has a thing specifically for cleaning under the rim. What I want to know is, why? Setting aside the question of how does anything even get under there, what's the point of cleaning there? I've been using toilets for over 50 years and I can tell you I have never once had occasion to look under the rim, and I've had plenty of experience with plumbers and even if there's a real problem with the toilet, I've never seen any of them look under the rim, or say to me, "Ya know, the problem's under the rim." Come to think of it, how would you look there even if you tried?

Haircut

I got a haircut the other day. I hate getting my hair cut, though I'm not sure why. There's nothing particularly unpleasant about it. My hair is cut by a heterosexual Russian guy who calls me "dear." My mother may have called me dear from time to time, but really I associate it with my Crazy Aunt Ida Great aunt, actually). Most middle-aged and older Jewish guys have a Crazy Aunt Ida, but I think the name has gone out of fashion and we may be the last of our breed.

My crazy Aunt Ida lived with her husband, Uncle Izzy, in Boro Park in Brooklyn. Izzy was Orthodox and belonged to a shul of World War I veterans, of which he was one. After WWI, he was a contractor and build many houses in Boro Park, though I'm not sure if his house was one of them. He was a gnarly old guy who didn't like many people, but he liked me and he tutored me for my Bar Mitzvah, which was the first Bar Mitzvah in his shul for over 30 years.

Izzy collapsed and died one day at age 89 and Ida tried to catch him as he fell and she fell and broke her hip. My dad arranged with the hospital to keep her there for a few extra days while a friend and I cleaned and painted the house (we had to work with the shades drawn on Shabbos). We found many bits of evidence of Eastern European fears and depression era money hoarding. Ida, though nuts, was a savvy investor who was into mutual funds long before it was cool. But she kept her money in 6 or 7 different banks and kept the bankbooks and stock certificates hidden under mattresses, behind radiators, at the back of the closet wrapped in a dirty rag, and under the area rug.

Well, this started off being about haircuts anyway.

College Lunch

I'm on a field trip at a local college with a group participating in an engineering competition, so I got to experience lunch in a college cafeteria. This is nothing like the ladies in hair nets and mystery meat experience I had back in the day. Here's the kinds of food that you could get (and it was all you could eat for like $7 ). There is a salad bar, a stir fry station, a panini station offering Monte Cristo (I don't know what's on a Monte Cristo, but I think it's something lie a Reuben) and portobello mushroom sandwiches, a tray full of grilled chicken breasts, french fries, baked potatoes, hamburgers, sandwiches and hoagies, toast your own hoagies and, in honor of Black History Month, Roast Pork Loin with collard greens and blackeyed peas salad. I think that's it. The soda machines have 8 choices and there's 3 kinds of milk and and a variety of coffee choices. For dessert there are piles of cookies, cakes and brownies everywhere, serve-yourself scooped and soft ice cream, waffles with toppings, and fruit. Plus there's a cereal bar and probably some stuff I missed. Flat screen and projection TV's with ESPN and C-Span all around. I want to live here. Oh, and I almost forgot the best part, a conveyor belt that you put your tray and dirty dishes on and it just disappears! I really want one of those at home.

I'd venture that it's important to develop decent eating habits before you go to college, because the traditional "freshman fifteen" is probably on the optimistic side otherwise. I didn't see any really skinny people around. They must not be on the meal plan. Unfortunately, the capitalist economic system and healthy eating habits are not really compatible, because to really make money on food you need to "add value," which means processing of some sort which usually involves adding salt, sugar, fat, or all of the above. By the way, it was pointed out to me that you can't eat "healthy foods," because that would imply that your food is alive. You can, however, eat "healthful foods."

Melancholy

I was listening to an old Elton John song (nothing you've heard of unless you were a fan in the early 1970's) and was struck by an overwhelming desire to talk to my friend Richard, who was a fellow fan of his early stuff. Richard was my college roommate and the friend who really introduced me to Philadelphia. He wasn't what you would call a high-powered, successful person. He'd probably agree with the New Pornographers lyric "success is just survival gone too far." But he was kind and generous with his time and spirit. He died suddenly in the summer of 2002. It's still the only funeral I've spoken at.

I told the story of when the house we were sharing (with 5 other people) in West Philadelphia was robbed. It was during the summer and someone left a window open on the first floor and a camera got stolen. This was a bunch of students living together and were weren't exactly fastidious. In fact, our most frequent fight was over who had to clean up that week. Anyway, the cops come and Richard, who was the only one home, came downstairs to talk to them. He told them about the stolen camera and the policeman said, "Well, it certainly looks like they ransacked the place." And Richard replied, "Nah, it always looks like this."

He was one of the very few people I could talk to about absolutely anything, and it saddens me that no matter how hard I try to summon him up, I can't get anything more than a memory.

Sleepover

To see Macbeth, we stayed over at our friends' house in Brooklyn. How did that go? I'll let you judge by their parting line, "When you come back in April we'll make sure to have some blankets."

Macbeth

Went to New York to see Macbeth this weekend. It's one of the few "major" Shakespeare plays I'd never read or seen before. I enjoyed it pretty much. It's an awful, violent, savage story, and for the most part the characters are not very subtle, but the language is marvelous and Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard and X-Men) was great as Macbeth, keeping some humanity about a character that is violent and cruel beyond redemption.

There are all kinds of familiar lines in it, "What's done is done," "Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble," "Out damned spot!" and this marvelous rumination on death

"Out, out brief candle,
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

Hearing Steward spit out the word "idiot" was a real highlight. At the end they carry out Macbeth's bloody severed head.

On that note, I'm going to watch the Oscars.

Modern Day Complaint

In the supermarket today I heard a man complaining to the woman at the self checkout line that all the checkouts sound alike which is confusing, so they ought to make all the checkout stations with different voices.

Lagniappe

In New Orleans, lagniappe (pronounced lan-yap) means a bit of unexpected good fortune. Though they probably don't get many snow days in New Orleans, a snow day is as good an example of lagniappe as anything.

There's nothing quite like waiting for a snow day, and I must say that as a teacher I enjoy them almost as much as I did when I was a kid. It's like a little bonus vacation, and everyone needs one of them now and again. The uncertainty is part of the excitement of it all. You go to bed not knowing what the morning will bring. Being a 3 school family we have to check multiple web sites to be sure we have all the information, but it's kind of a routine by now.

Homelike

Finally brought the monster truck back to the airport. We actually dented it, but my local mechanic pretty much undented it and hopefully I won't get charged anything. I already paid Avis a lot of money this summer when my rented minivan got tangled up with a stray bicycle (sitting in the driveway, not with someone riding it).

American Idol is on now, ready to strike another blow against competent singing. The singing on that show is almost uniformly awful, mostly because it's so uniform. That Carrie Underwood was such a standout just because she sounded like a generic county singer is evidence enough, but the focus on the big note in every song makes Idol singers sound like parodies of themselves after a while. Oh, plus it's boring, except when Simon is talking or Paula is stoned on something.

Going outside right now to see the lunar eclipse. It cleared up just in time.

Update

Much to my dismay, I have found a small cache of regular sized mugs and plates, leading me to conclude that the huge dishes are nothing more than a ploy to confuse and entertain the renting public.

It's currently 32 degrees with freezing rain and 30 mph winds here. We've always said there's never bad weather here (even a blizzard is fun in the Adirondacks), but this is pretty unpleasant.

Notes

The dishes in the condo are odd. I feel kind of like I'm in the land of the Brobdignandians. There are two kids of dishes, large and huge. The cereal bowls could hold pretty much a whole box of cereal, so everyone eats cereal out of mugs, because the mugs are only big enough to hold half a box.

I noticed yesterday that gravity seems stronger here. At least it seemed to be pulling me down the mountain faster and more insistently than it does in the Poconos.

Lake Placid

This is a cute little town in the Adirondacks. Actually, the town itself is pretty nondescript, but it's mercifully low on chain stores. There's a Gap and EMS and a Bass outlet, but everything else is local shops, and though there's a Starbucks and a Quiznos, most people shun them. The town's economy runs on the glow of the 1980 (and to a lesser extent 1932) Winter Olympics. We like the ice rinks and speed skating oval, and the bobsled/luge track is fun when there's a race, and sometimes there's a competition of the ski jump. The ski mountain, Whiteface, is nice too.

Our favorite attraction is the toboggan chute. They took the 1932 ski jump ramp and put it next to the lake and you rent a toboggan for 5 bucks and and a couple of burly guys pack your family onto it and push you down the ramp. You fly down screaming and slide about a quarter mile across the lake. This is one of the most fun things I've ever done.

I should note that the town of Lake Placid (known to the scruffier towns around here as Lake Plastic) is not actually on Lake Placid. It's on Mirror Lake. This is a curious pattern in the area, where the city of Saranac Lake is on Lake Flower and Tupper Lake is not on any lake at all.

But the big thing for us is the lake and mountain views and the air. I know back in the pre-antibiotic days they used to send people with tuberculosis up here to cure them, and there is definitely something about the air that makes me feel incredibly healthy. No matter how bad I'm feeling when when we arrive it has never failed to improve my energy and my mood.

Today was a pretty typical winter day for me here. I walked around Mirror Lake, which takes around 40 minutes. Then I gathered up the kiddies and took them to ski. I skied too, then came back to the condo we rented and napped and hung out until dinner at one of the convivial and mediocre restaurants that dot the main street. The best food in town is at a little restaurant next to the Price Chopper supermarket and at a deli that bakes its own bread and has a kickass Sunday brunch.

The main lift at Whiteface is a gondola, so you spend 5 minutes in a small space with 7 other people, so there are little social dos and don'ts. I had to make a quick phone call and asked if people minded my using my phone for a moment. The others were so thrilled that I was polite enough to ask that I probably could have done a dozen major business transactions without anyone minding. One big thing is that if you offer your skiing buddy gum you have to offer it everyone in the gondola ("did you bring enough for everybody?"). And it's always okay to ask "where are you from?" The first day I had people form Philly, Quebec, Princeton and Germany. Today I had a group of college buddies who'd diasporaed (that's a word, right?) to California, Florida, Virginia and New York.

In the lodge we saw a kind of fashion show. A bunch of guys come in wearing ski shorts, I didn't even know they made ski shorts, with brightly colored tights underneath which they proceed to remove and change into regular clothes, right in the food court. No nudity, but still pretty entertaining.

Once again, I find myself the only male being in a group of 6. I think if the ratio were reversed we would not have watched the Bratz movie last night.

Away

I'm in Lake Placid, NY, which is one of my favorite places on earth. It feels kind of amazing that we got here, considering how difficult everything about preparation was, and we managed to get through the drive without any of the attached bags flying off the roof. I am driving a rented monster truck, which makes me feel bigger than, and by extension, superior to you.

A couple of random notes:

I saw a package at the ski area that was marked "Do Not Crush." Why do they need to print that there? What kind of package is okay to crush? I guess if you're mailing sponges or pillows it's fine, but as a general rule I try not to crush pretty much everything I handle.

In a decision that can only be the product of stupidity by committee (which is always the best kind of stupidity), the New York State Thruway is renovating ALL of its rest areas at the same time. So that means that from the New Jersey state line to Albany, a span of 140 miles, the only food you can get on the road is Roy Rogers fast food. We had a passenger who's a vegetarian, and she had mashed potatoes for dinner. Might have made more sense to renovate every other area, so that there might be a bit more variety every 50 miles or so, but that would have meant doing the same thing New Jersey did.

People are really nice once you get out of the big city areas.

I'm seeing Macbeth next weekend and so now I have to read the play, because it's tough to follow Shakespeare if you don't already know it. All I know about Macbeth is that it's very bloody and it has the line "Bubble, bubble toil and trouble" in it. I'll let you know how that goes.

No comment needed

Dennis Hopper doing a commercial during the Grammys for retirement investments.

Englishish

I was pleased to learn this week that not only is "friend" a verb, but so is "defriend." It used to be "befriend," but I think that means something different and "debefriend" will never do. THis is much more exciting than knowing that "chill" is now an adjective, when we were previously stuck with chilly or chilled, neither of which mean anything like "chill."

You can always tell when someone has taken Latin when they say things like, as Phil Sheriden says in a column about the Eagles, "the people doing this are doofuses (doofi?)." I do the same thing. In some cases, like focuses and foci, both can be correct. It's more fun to do it with things that are clearly not Latin-based or only sound like they end with us, like tortoise and torti.

Random

Adults are famously stupid about kids. I can go on and on about how kids are so busy texting and IMing and listening to their iPods while they're doing 3 other things that they're not aware of the world around them. Back in my day, we didn't need all these distractions to be completely oblivious. And that makes us superior. Or it doesn't.

I'm guessing it's like this because people who read the food section of the newspaper tend to be older women, but do really think even they want to see ads for varicose vein removal in next to the recipe for chicken satay?

Watching a dog show on TV, the announcers are always talking about how the dogs give back to the community. I think my dog needs to be more socially responsible. Mostly all she does is bark at squirrels, which does have some value I suppose. I could swear I heard the guy say that one of the dogs in the show helps kids learn to read. How cool is that?

Eew

Just dropped a container of yogurt on the floor, so now the basement smells peachyyoguriffic. Hmm, spell check flagged that word...

That's hardly the worst thing I ever dropped and had to clean up. Aside from my kids (jk), it would have to be that glass bottle full of cooking oil. Oh, you haven't lived until you've spent an hour on hour hands and knees trying to clean up oil-covered shards of glass.

At least it never bothers me to get that kind of stuff on my hands. I have to credit my kids for that. Since changing diapers, nothing else really seems that bad.

Politics and Sports

So tomorrow is the big day, the one that will settle everything or ensure than nothing will be settled for quite some time. It's exciting, with two historic candidates on the Democratic side, though I wish I was a bit more enthused about their ability to undo the unprecedented damage that the current administration has done to the country. It's going to be a big mess to clean up, that's all I know, and anyone who's seen my desk can tell you it's much easier to make a mess than to clean one up.

I actually watched the Super Bowl yesterday, which was its own kind of upset because it was the first football game I'd watched all year. I had no rooting interest going in, but my inner New Yorker showed up almost immediately and had me strongly rooting for the Giants almost immediately. I think the fact that the Patriots are cheaters might have swayed me a bit too, as well as fond memories of the 17-0 Dolphins. I remember after that season, there was a picture of their running backs, Jim Kiick and Larry Csonka, on the cover of Sports Illustrated with them both surreptitiously giving the finger to the camera. This, of course, caused a minor scandal to which the amused players said something like, "They took like a hundred pictures nobody asked them to use that one."

The best news in all of this is that football season is over. We'll have to get through a month or so of nothing but players rushing back and forth between nets, but pitchers and catchers report to spring training on February 15 and that portends the start of baseball season. This pleases me no end. I love baseball and always miss it when its gone. There has been much lyrical prose written about the beauty of baseball by writers much better than me, so I shall not partake. But for me, baseball is perfect.

Today's Newspaper

In the sports section of the New York Times today, there were two Super Bowl articles that caught my eye. First was the story of a monastery that was renting out rooms at inflated but still reasonable rents (no TV, no alcohol allowed, but spiritual guidance available 24/7). Second was an article I didn't even read with the heading "Belichick Expands Wardrobe." I'm scintillated without even having to take the time to read. I really despise the 2 weeks of endless Super Bowl articles and pictures. No football game could possibly be that interesting (though I'm sure I'll watch it).

The good news is, only 15 days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

Foulmouth

Nothing warms a father's heart more than hearing his teenage daughter drop the f-bomb at least once or twice every few minutes. Who wouldn't be proud? We avoided using that kind of language in the house for a long time, but kind of relaxed about it a bit this year. And who would have thought an adolescent would take a mile if you gave them an inch? It's so unfair. I've since had to call her on repeated use of the f word at 6:45 AM in response to not being able to find something in the refrigerator. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Since I can't swear on the job now (as opposed to the world of advertising where it's ubiquitous) and wouldn't let myself do it at home, I of course rationalized it by making it an educational experience. If you can't use swear words, you have to think of the correct descriptive word, helping to make you more articulate. You can also rationalize it by saying that swear words are more effective if you only use them if you really need them. The other side of the argument, as was succinctly pointed out to me by one of my students, is that any sentence sounds better with a swear word in it.

Just as an informational note, since I don't use that kind of language here, whenever I need to substitute something for this words I will avoid the more current "s---" and use the traditional #*@%!. I think it's much more eloquent that way.

Life in a nutshell

A couple of weeks ago I went to buy some skis for my daughter. She's a good skier and I wanted to get her this one pair and then never have to do it again, so I decided in advance I'd get her something good that she could use for many years. When we get to the store, it turns out that her boots that I thought I had to replace were fine, saving me a lot of money, so I spend some of it on her skis. So it turns out she's getting an awesome pair of skis.

They tell me I can pay then or when I pick up, so of course I said I'd pay later, because I don't have to worry about having my mom or dad there to pay for it. They note this on the tag and send them off to have the bindings mounted.

I go to pick them up tonight and the guy pulls the tag off the skis and says, "Did you buy them here?" and I say yes, so he says it would be $21.20 for the mounting. I sign the receipt, he says thank you, and I say, "I'm probably going to be the most honest customer you've ever had, but I never paid for the skis." There's 4 of them behind the counter and they look at me dumbfounded, and I say, "Well I'm sure someone would have eventually noticed that you were missing an expensive pair of skis that never got paid for and someone would have gotten in trouble." And they all shook their heads and said, "No way, they never would have known." I looked at the tag and it really looked like the "Not Paid" referred to the mounting, not the skis themselves.

So they give me a big discount on the skis for being an honest customer and even carry them out to the car for me. I save a couple hundred dollars and feel good about myself. And I feel so good about myself that I momentarily lose focus while I'm driving and almost hit a pedestrian.

I can't think of a pithy moral for this, but "Be an honest person and, for God's sake, pay attention when you're driving" will do.

Ski

I went skiing yesterday. Kind of a spur of the moment thing which I picked because I had the time and it was such a perfect day. I went to Bear Creek, formerly known as Doe Mountain. All the slopes are named after bear-related things. Did they all used to be deer-related things? I don't know.

People seemed surprised that I was going alone, but don't you always ski alone? You can ride the lift with someone, but the skiing itself? Anyway, I like having some alone time.

The skiing was marvelous and there were only a couple of hundred people there, so I decided to ski without a helmet. I just bought a helmet last year (see my earlier post on the War on Fun), which I'd resisted because the wind in your hair thing is part of the joy of skiing. I rarely fall- once or twice a season tops- but when it's crowded I'm concerned that someone might run into me. I guess the joke about snowboarders got to me. How does a snowboarder introduce himself? "Sorry, dude."

I got through the day without head trauma, but not without incident. Getting off the lift with some other guy in the chair and we noticed that there was a pole sitting in the snow right where you got off. Of course, it's the job of the guy in the booth to notice this kind of thing and stop the lift, but he was too caught up in the many other responsibilities of sitting in a little booth, so the other guy tried to kick it away with his ski. We both got so fixated ont his pole that we forgot to get off at the right time. I jumped off, and as I did the other guy started to and then stopped, hitting me in the chest with his skis in the process. I landed awkwardly and my leg and back hurt a bit as a result.

Aside from that it was a great time. My favorite thing was, as I was leaving I stopped in the bathroom (kudos to Bear Creek for the many boxes of tissues in the bathrooms, by the way) and as I'm washing my hands a snowboarder came in, covered with snow, goes over to one of the electric hand dryers, and stands with his back to it and pulls back on this waistband so that the hot air warms his butt. Excellent, dude. I used the other hand dryer.

Martin Luther King and Star Trek

On Monday I was watching TV while I was exercising and saw that an episode of the original Star Trek was on. I liked Star Trek its first time through, but it was a real favorite in reruns when I was in college. In honor of Dr. King they were playing THE most didactic (and many of the episodes were pretty didactic) racial episode of all.

It's about two mortal enemies whose faces are black on one side and white on the other, whose people have been in constant war for the last 50,000 years. Why have they been at war, you might ask? Well, one of them is of the ruling race and the other is of the oppressed. Why, again you might ask? Well, one of them is black on the left side of his face and white on the right side of his face, and the other is white on the left side of his face and black on the right side. It ends with both races wiped out except for the two of them, chasing each other around their lifeless planet.

I'm sure there's a message in there somewhere but I can't figure out what it is because they keep banging me over the head with it. There is some value in bringing things like prejudice up for ridicule, I suppose, but this one makes me groan.

MLK

I saw the motel where he was killed and the place the shot came from. Spooky.

My community service today consisted of driving my kids to their community service projects. Not very fulfilling, I must say.

It's kind of weird to think all that civil rights stuff happened in my lifetime, but it did. I grew up in a very integrated neighborhood in New York and it never occurred to me until I started reading the newspapers. I don't remember Rosa Parks but I certainly remember Martin Luther King.

Cleaning House

Our housekeeper just had twins, and some of the cleaning falls to me. I'm not a particularly good cleaner, but I don't mind it because you have to look at everything around the house in a different way, and I always enjoy that kind of thing.

For instance, we have a nice little glass-top coffee table in the living room. Never really paid much attention to it, as long as it kept the remote controls from crashing to the floor when I let go of them. Now I notice that it gets a ring on it every time someone puts a drink down on it. And we have no coasters! And the thing is, dare I say, a dust magnet. I'd also never noticed just how often the refrigerator gets crud on its handle, that the underside of our kitchen counter is icky, that our dog sheds constantly, and that in the shower, the water makes, well, water spots.

Okay, back to searching the Internet for the best kind of duster.

Another Icon

Bobby Fischer died yesterday. I feel repetitive going on another tear about someone who was big when I was younger, but Bobby Fischer was an unparalleled phenomenon. I guess people watch people play poker on TV, but I doubt that you can conceive of most of the American public watching a guy describing a chess game on TV for hours on end. The Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky world championship match came during the cold war and anything that was US vs. Russia was highly charged. This was especially so because Russians has ALWAYS been champions of chess.

Fischer insisted that the match be televised and then lost the first match on a mistake (or "blunder" as they invariably call it in chess) and blamed the noise from the TV cameras. Then he refused to play the second game in front of the cameras and forfeited. In a chess match, you get a point for a win and half for a draw, and in the world championship you play to 12. So he spots the world champion a 2-0 lead, bullies him into playing in a back room, leaving the people who bought tickets sitting in the auditorium looking at a big projection of a chess board. At home, we also saw the projection of the board and a nerdy but personable little guy named Shelby Lyman (I still remember) explaining the moves as they happened. Fischer proceeds to stomp Spassky, playing every single game differently (in a game where opponents obsessively study each others' patterns) and breaking his will by using a line of play he'd never used before and one Spassky was famously good at playing, and beating him almost effortlessly. The match took pretty much the entire summer of 1972 and the country was transfixed. Fischer, unfortunately was a lunatic, and pretty much disappeared afterward, and at the times he reappeared you'd wished he hadn't.

Of course, there was about a 6 month-long chess craze during the match and afterwards, but it's ultimately too hard to be really good at chess for it ever to become too popular. I got to the point where I could actually plan a couple of moves in advance and play with some sense of purpose, but the complete absence of luck made it all seem too heavy. If you lost you could blame only yourself, which was too much responsibility for a teenager. So I switched to the probably equally nerdy game of bridge, which I was already pretty good at and played frequently and happily for a number of years. Bridge is also very hard, but you play with a partner so it's social and there's plenty of luck in the casual game (though not in tournaments, of which I played a dozen or so during college, including one at Penn).

Two side notes...

The movie Searching For Bobby Fischer is excellent. I highly recommend it. It's not about Bobby Fischer. It's about a kid chess player.

Playing bridge was a small but key link in the chain of thought that led me to be a math teacher. My friends and I used to stay after school and play. Our favored spot was the math conference room. After we'd been doing this for several weeks, one of the math teachers spotted us and asked if he could join the game, which of course we let him do and eventually others joined as well. So all through my senior year I hung out with my friends and the math teachers, and it was a very pleasant thing and gave me chance to know them as real people and feel positive about them.

The War on Fun

Today I went to the lounge to fill my water bottle from the water cooler. There was no water left in the bottle, so I went and grabbed another to replace it. When I took the cap off the new bottle I discovered, to my horror, that there was a leakproof valve on top of the bottle, to prevent water from spilling as you installed it. I'm sorry, but the only pleasure in replacing a water cooler bottle was seeing if you could do it without spilling water all over the place. I mean, there's plenty of other places where you can get water, but not many opportunities to take an open 5 gallon bottle of some liquid and turn it upside down. So I'm very let down.

From my recollection, this war on fun started with the popularization and eventual enforced use of bicycle helmets and continues unabated. When I was a kid, we had something called monkey bars. They were open structures made out of steel pipes, shaped kind of like a house or layer cake, 10-15 feet high, and you climbed up them and swung on them and hung upside down by your knees and it was the best thing in the playground. The fact that we were without adult supervision, hanging upside down in a place where if I slipped I would hit about a half dozen steel bars before crashing to the concrete (or asphalt if you were lucky) below, never seemed weird.

Now, of course, you can't even find such a thing anywhere. It took a significant image search just to find a picture. I always assumed it was because they were dangerous but now I'm starting to think it was because they were fun, and there's nothing that these people hate more than fun, at least for other people.

Astonishing

Since "awesome" is overused, I needed to come up with a new word, and I don't hear anyone say "astonishing." It's too many syllables or something.

I was listening to the decades channels on XM radio today- the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90s. I don't really listen to old music much. I swore to myself that I'd never be one of those people whose musical taste got frozen when they were in high school or college. But in my car CD player at the moment are 2 Rilo Kiley albums, A New Pornographers album, and "Learn French In Your Car" (P.S., you can't). I like the 3 albums very much, but they're pretty similar and I got bored.

I kind of flipped by Chuck Berry, because he's such a pioneer of rock and roll that it's difficult to think of it as real music, but it's kind of fun to think about what it must have sounded like when people had never heard anything like that before. I then heard a bit of an interview about Hank Williams. I'm not a big country music fan, but you can trace almost everything in country music back to Hank Williams. I saw a show about his life once. He died when he was 29, and the musical legacy he left is truly astonishing. Nobody since has caught the perfect balance between pathos and charm and humor and great, hook-filled melodies. "Lovesick Blues" and "Jambalaya" were two of my favorites. If you're into music, check it out.

Then I heard "Billie Jean." Michael Jackson has become sort of a joke, but there is nobody in music today who was as hugely famous and successful as he was in the early 80's. I was in my mid 20's a pretty serious softball player at the time and after our games we'd go to this hole-in-the-wall bar on 3rd Avenue and 93rd Street. Sweeney's I think it was called. The best thing about it was that they'd sell you pitchers of beer or mixed drinks and let you take them outside and hang out on the sidewalk. There weren't tables or anything and I'm sure it wasn't really legal, but nobody bothered us. There was a pizza place a couple of blocks away and somebody's go and get some pizzas and we'd eat them out there. It was always packed with softball players after the games. So one time I go inside to get a refill and I see and hear this video on the TV and it was for "Billie Jean" and I'd never seen anything like it. Jackson was the first to do really interesting videos. He was a superb dancer and showman and a real pioneer in music video as a pop culture form. And the song...The best way I can describe it is "itchy." It just makes you have to move. It's a perfect blend of R&B and pop and if you don't think so try playing that song before you hear some modern R&B/pop blender like Beyonce and see which one makes you want to dance.

I've never forgotten the moment seeing that thing. I think there's a DVD of his videos, including the famous 17 minute "Thriller" video, narrated by Vincent Price and directed by John Landis, director of Animal House and the Blues Brothers and Trading Places. Best music video choreography ever by Jackson. Very much worth a Netflix rental. Of course, we all know his story didn't end well, but in 1983 there was nothing to compare.

As a footnote, that song was followed by Steve Miller Band, "Fly Like An Eagle," the consensus most impossible rock song to dance to.

Juno

Actually saw a movie last night. We really liked it. The girl was great, and all the supporting roles were well done too. Nothing rang false. I loved J.K. Simmons (I like him in everything) and Alison Janney. We wondered afterward whether the right-to-lifers of pro-choicers would like it better. She does decide to have the baby, but not on any moral grounds, and the point is, I guess, that she has a choice.

Don't want to make it too heavy. It was a lot of fun and a great soundtrack. Any movie that has the Kinks and Sonic Youth can't be all bad.

The Meaning of Life

There's Monty Python bit with an interview where the interviewee has a "theory about the brontosaurus." There's a long lead-in, but ultimately her theory is, "All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end."

I've decided that that's a good a theory of what life's about as any. Life is thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end. So when my life seems too busy and overwhelming I can take some comfort in where I have been and where I (hopefully) will be.

Baseball

I was on XM Radio's baseball channel a little while ago. The hosts were talking to Lee Smith, who was until recently the all-time Major League leader in saves, and he couldn't have been nicer and more charming, so I called in with a story of when I saw him play in the minor leagues (a true story in fact, not that I'm above making things up from time to time).

I was driving across the country by myself. I was moving to Philadelphia to go to school and didn't want a car there, so we sold it to my aunt who lives in Sacramento. To amuse myself, I stopped and saw baseball games everywhere I could along the way. First Cleveland, then Chicago, and then I was intending to see an afternoon game in Minneapolis, but it was raining there, so I headed south because I was going to visit my brother in Colorado on the way to California (another story to attach here at another time).

I got to Des Moines (actually pronounced demoyne, to my disappointment) around 8 PM and was scanning through the radio dial and hit on a minor league game in progress, and saw on my map a place called Sec Taylor Stadium so I headed over there and watch the last 5 innings of the game. There are 3 things I remember about the game. First, every time someone hit a foul ball back over the stands, the PA announcer would say "And there goes another one into the mighty Raccoon River." Second, it was foggy, almost too foggy to see the outfield fence from behind home plate. Third was Lee Smith.

Iowa was up by a couple of runs in the 9th inning and they called for their closer, announced as "Lee Arthur Smith." And out of the fog comes the biggest baseball player I've ever seen. Smith is about 6' 8" 275 pounds and solid as a rock. He threw about 100 mph. And even from the stands you could tell the batters were terrified about this huge guy throwing so hard out of the fog. But he didn't hurt anyone. He struck out two and the other guy popped out. He was in the majors about a month later and I've never forgotten the moment.

Parenting (Updated)

My lack of anonymity here often prevents me from discussing in detail anything about my family, but I did want to make some general observations as one who deals with teenagers both as a teacher and parent.

First off, the hardest thing for me to balance is how to set rules and limits and guidelines without totally alienating said teenagers, whether in a class or at home. It's not hard to clamp down on someone, and it's certainly to keep lines of communication open, but it's hard to do both at the same time.

The key, I think is listening. Listening is a skill that is highly underrated for almost any job or activity having to do with people, and it's important not to take it for granted. I know I've ranted from time to time about how I don't think multitasking is good for you, but the absolute worst time to be thinking and doing something else is when someone is talking to you. As both a teacher and a parent, part of my job is to be a mind reader, and mind reading is hard enough if you are listening. I submit that it's impossible to do so if you're not. More on this later.

Second, no matter what you think of yourself, you have to get out of your head the idea of being a "cool parent." There is no such thing. No matter how good your fashion sense, skills, taste in music, physical coordination or knowledge about pop culture, when it comes right down to it cool people do not make and enforce rules. They don't create consequences for misbehavior, in fact, ignoring misbehavior is part of what cool is, and it's antithetical to a parent's duty. Baby boomers such as myself, who grew up in an era when it was of utmost importance to be cool, have to get over this and it's hard. You can be a cool person without being a cool parent.

Update
My colleagues pointed out that it is possible that your kids will refer to you as a cool parent once they emerge from their adolescent purgatory.

On a slightly related note, on Degrassi yesterday, one of the kids was bemoaning how "These are supposed to be the best days of my life.." and my wife and I both snorted and shouted back at the screen (and my daughter) "These are not the best years of your life. They're the hardest and possible the worst. So it cuts both ways.