Pharn it!

My radio was hijacked today. Not stolen, mind you, but I have XM Satellite Radio in my car. I find today that many of the channels have either changed position or name or format or all 3. It's because XM merged with Sirius Satellite Radio and they've finally combined their lineups. Sirius has some good stuff, but they also have the annoying habit of calling their channels things like "Siriusly Sinatra" (and I checked, it's spelled like that too). Maybe I'm oversensitive, but I live in a place where people are absolutely insistent on spelling anything that starts with an F with a Ph and it drives me up a wall. It's the one and only thing that makes me happy about the end of the baseball season is that I no longer have to hear about having the Phillies Phestival at the ballpark.

On the other hand, you may know that my convention in this blog is to use the traditional #*%! to represent swear words, but if I didn't I would definitely use a 5 letter variant of one of the more popular phour letter words.

Wrong Aid

I don't know anyone who likes the designs of the Rite Aid stores, with the aisles at weird angles and such. They've compounded the problem at the one near me by "reorganizing" the store. As best I can see, this means having all the shelves packed with stuff without your being able to find anything you want to buy. Hmm, there used to be razor blades right here and now there's toilet paper and christmas lights. And what happened to all the batteries from the battery display? It looks like someone's following a directive from some central office and giving not a thought to the customer.

The highlight of this trip was the halloween candy section. By now we're up to 75% off stuff, and it's always worth a peek to see what hasn't managed to sell even after a week of being 50% off. There's lots of gummy stuff. I've never really gotten the whole appeal of gummies. If I want something gummy I get gum. Just like if I want something chocolatey I get chocolate. I wasn't surprised to see either the Gummy Body Parts of the High School Musical Gummies left in the bin. And who thought Chocolate Skittles was a good idea?

In The Holiday Spirit

One of the most important things one has to do in this time between Halloween and Thanksgiving is to avoid eating anything pumpkin flavored. It requires constant vigilance and the attention to detail necessary to reject anything with the word "seasonal" in the description.

Philanthropy Throwdown

Tonight I'm going to see La La La Human Steps (a modern dance troupe) in the Perelman Center in the Kimmel Center. I think Perelman and Kimmel are both still alive. Do they like each other? Is it okay with Perelman having his theater inside Kimmel's center? I think these are important questions.

And the funny thing is, I probably know someone who knows the answers.

Grandfriends

It was Grandparents and Grandfriends Day today. Am I the only one puzzled by "grandfriends"? It's not in the dictionary, though it's certainly snappier than "Grandparents and Much Much Older People Who Aren't Related to You Day." Is this a common thing? I don't get out much, but I don't know anybody who has a friend more than, say, 20 years older than them. I'm around 40 years older than most of my students. Does that make me a grandfriend? (Just as an aside, I keep typing "grandfiend" by mistake) I don't have any kind of problem with the concept, I just think if I were trying to expand the potential target for an event, this wouldn't have been the first thing I picked.

Mighty Oaks Come From What?

I've pretty much lost patience talking politics with the Republican kids. If I just want to hear official Republican talking points du jour parroted I can watch Fox News. The latest topic is Acorn and voter fraud. I'll set aside the fact that the most recent people convicted of vote-related crimes are Republican operatives jamming phone lines. I'm just not convinced that it's a greater evil to allow someone to vote who shouldn't than it is to disenfranchise someone. In fact the whole democracy concept (i.e., the idea that the citizens vote for their leaders) implies that disenfranchisement is a pretty bad thing.

Obviously, if there's proof of an organized attempt by a party to consciously allow unqualified people to vote, that's another thing entirely. But so far, the only organized activity has been by parties seeking to make it difficult or impossible for qualified people to participate.

At a loss for words

What a great, great great week this has been.

Election Night

I'm going to be sitting in front of the TV with my laptop at hand. It's not as much fun as a debate drinking game (maverick!). Not sure what I'm going to do when this is over. I mean, baseball's over and that's bad enough (though the ending was sweet) but it seems like the presidential race has been going on for a very long time. I dare not get too hopeful, but maybe it'll be one more sweet ending tonight.

I voted around 11:30 and had no problems, though I was told there'd been 100 people on line at 7:15 (we have 2 machines here) and about half the ward had voted already by the time I was there. We always have pretty good turnout around here, but never 600 out of 1200 by 11AM.

Political Pumpkins

If you want some fun, try Googling that.

Update: One site reports 68% Obama pumpkin patterns downloaded versus 32% McCain patterns

Why This One is Special

I've been a baseball fan since 1962 and during that time have had the good fortune to attend 8 World Series in 3 different cities and 5 different ball parks. In 6 of those Series, I saw the final game. Mets win in 1969, Yankees win in 1977 and 1996, Orioles lose in 1979, and Yankees lose in 2003. I also saw one Yankees-Mets game in 2000 and all the home playoff and Series games for the Phillies in 1993.

So where does this one fit in? I was certainly more excited in 1969 and 1977, but I was a lot more excitable way back then. But this year it just made me really happy. I've been watching this group of players develop for a long time and all this year I've been totally impressed by their focus and resilience and their absolute refusal to get down on themselves or give up. This was the first Series I've seen where one team won primarily because they were stronger mentally. The Phillies overcame every setback and got hot when they needed to be (24-6 in their last 30 games!). And they play really good baseball, fun baseball to watch. It's been a very easy team to root for. So as much as I'm happy as a fan and happy for the city, I'm especially happy for the players.

Which players? Let's see...

I've got no problem with Cole Hamels winning MVP. In many ways, the Series revolved around him and he did everything that was asked of him.

Jimmy Rollins had an inconsistent offensive year, but his spirit set the team's upward trajectory into motion and there's nobody I'd rather have a ground ball hit to with the game on the line.

Pedro Feliz can now say he drove in the winning run in the World Series. Didn't have a job on January 30.

Chase Utley plays the game the way man was intended to. Ryan Howard is a absolutely brutal fielder but an absolutely brilliant power hitter, unlike any I've ever seen, and I've seen a bunch of them.

Pat Burrell was never as great as hoped, but he's been a consistent positive presence in the middle of the lineup.

Brett Myers is the ultimate head case, had the most amazing at bat of the postseason, and pitched way better in the Series than the box score shows.

Brad Lidge, so totally maligned for a couple of high profile failures, had as good a season and postseason as any reliever ever. Read the interview where he talked about how he felt before that last pitch and then marvel at how that state of being led to his throwing as perfect a pitch as you'll ever see. And Ryan Madson suddenly went from pretty good to amazing at exactly the right time.

Carlos Ruiz, who was a net negative offensively all season long, really raised his game when it counted.

Geoff Jenkins, a non-entity all year, especially in the clutch, had a career defining moment.

And then there's the scrap heap, most of whom we owe Pat Gillick thanks for. J.C. Romero (released last year- 2 Series wins this year!), Jayson Werth (the best offensive player in the Series), Shane Victorino, Scott Eyre, Chad Durbin (not so great of late, but a huge contributor in the first half when they were scuffling), Greg Dobbs, and last, but certainly not least, Jamie Moyer, who looked finished both before the Phils got him and again at the end of last year (and several times before that).

As an aside, I really liked the way Fox showed each individual player reacted to the final strike.

So now we're left with that game they play once a week. Just think how differently football would be played if they had to play 6 games a week for 162 games. It would look almost nothing like what we see now. And once that's over a couple months of guys rushing back and forth between nets and then in mid February we start all over again. I can't wait.

WOW!WOW!WOW!WOW!WOW!

A Bit More Baseball Commentary

I had finally settled down about how miserable it was at the ballgame last night, and was happy not to have to go there tonight. Then I read something on the Phillies site that got me all riled up again. It's a quote from Bob duPuy (doo-PAY), MLB's president and CEO, talking about how well the Phillies (and by proxy, MLB) handled dealing with ticket policies:

On Tuesday, DuPuy said fans were given ample notification on Monday night to retain their tickets in case of a rainout or suspension. Traditionally, stubs are needed to obtain tickets to another game during the regular season.

"Our tickets say that," DuPuy said. "The club announced it. They announced it as soon as we went into the delay. It went up on the board and they announced it again when the game was suspended. I think the club handled it very well, and I hope that the fans did in fact hold their tickets.

So let's say I'll stipulate that all baseball tickets say that the ticket is to be used in case of a rainout and I'll note that I did keep my ticket. But there was NO announcement of any type at any time regarding the delay, only an announcement when they suspended the game. In fact, my biggest frustration (aside from the obvious actual baseball-related one) was that nobody had any information. It's nice they put it on the board, but if you're in the concourse to get out of the rain, which is where most of the people were, you can't see the board, especially when it's so crowded. We actually left as soon as we saw the radar weather on TV, so we never heard anything.

There are monitors all over the park. None had any useful information of any kind. Most just had a note to FOX affiliates to run their own programming. Fortunately, I'm a partial season ticket holder, so I got an e-mail telling me what the procedures were, but that was after I was already home. It was very poorly handled and I don't think they oughta be patting themselves on the back.

Secret Information

In case anyone was wondering what it's like in the Faculty Restroom (at least the one on the ground floor), here's a summary:

It's kind of a big empty thing, even bigger than it needs in order to be "accessible," so there's lots of floor space. The light turns on automatically when you go in. There's the usual sink and toilet. Adjacent to the toilet is a rack full of small brown paper bags, I guess in case you want to pack a lunch in there. There are 2 soap dispensers, right next to each other. One is the regular pump kind and the other is the fun kind where you put your hand under it and it squirts you a dollop of foam. I'm not used to a 2:1 soap dispenser to sink ratio and make sure to use each kind of soap equally over the course of a day.

There are also 2 paper towel dispensers- the kind with the pre-folded brown towels and the integrated trash chute (though this one lacks the actual towels), and also one of those new fangled ones where you pull down from the center and the roll is used from the inside out. It's clear, so you can see the paper move. It also periodically rips too high up and there's no towel sticking out to grab. It's an imperfect technology.

Finally, there's a map telling you which way to go to get out of the building in case of a fire or fire drill (boy, are fire drills easier in a building that's up to code). It tells you to turn right and if you can't turn right, then turn left. The wall's straight ahead, so that's all the options.

As I write, I've decided that I will begin to decorate this room. I'll keep you posted.

Argh!

So I'm sitting at this ballgame, getting wetter and wetter, and my wife says to me (very nicely, by the way) "I thought you said there was only going to be a tenth of an inch of rain." And I said, well, that's what Accuweather said, but maybe I made a mistake and looked at Inaccuweather by mistake."

Reminds me of a Far Side cartoon where two guys are in the jungle and covered with bugs. One of them is holding a spray can whose label says "ON" and the other one is yelling, "You idiot, you brought the wrong stuff."

In any event, that was a truly miserable experience, though the first 3 innings were fine.

Just never enough time

Did you know that there's Australian-style yogurt? What in the world could that be? I'd like to investigate, but the flight's too long.

Mind Control

I was listening to one of my favorite songs yesterday while I was driving and realized that the last time I'd heard that song I was driving in the same place. Why in the world would I remember something like that? What possible purpose could retaining where you heard a song have? What biological imperative is served by retaining your song hearing location. Did this somehow cause my ancestors to flourish while others died out?

Actually, I've come up with something. I remember that last time I was so into the song I took a curve too quickly and ended up swerving around a little. So was it some 5ht degree survival instinct? Hard to know.

And referring back to something a said a few days ago, if you think you're in control of your brain, how come that song's been stuck in your head for hours now?

Political question

When was it exactly that religion became so completely intertwined with American politics? I seem to recall that that wasn't the Founding Fathers' idea of how it was supposed to work. I'm not really going that deep here, but why do politicians all have to mention God so much?

Economics

I saw in the paper that sales of existing homes fell last month. Is there a big market for homes that don't exist? This seems like a business with a potentially high profit margin.

End of Preschool (revised to include more graveside musings)

Starting next week, we have full school weeks for the first time since September. It'll be a relief to actually be able to teach something. It's hard to keep any kind of focus when you're constantly interrupted, so although I like the time off, I'm ready to get going.

I went to a funeral today for someone I never met, the father of a colleague. It was truly interesting. He sounds like the coolest guy ever and I'm sorry I never met him (not that there's any reason I would have). This is the second time I've had this experience. The first was a friend's father who died much younger, so the funeral was much bigger because most of his friends and relatives were still alive. This is not so much the case with a 97-year-old. When you go to a funeral of someone you know, you think about the person who died. When you don't know the person, you start thinking about yourself.

Oh man, I really need to buy a burial plot.

This place is pretty nice. But there are a lot of dead people here.

I wonder where else you could get buried.

Who'd come to my funeral?

I need to expand my circle of friends so more people would come.

No, that's ridiculous. Why do I care who comes?

Oh man, I'm going to die.

And of course, the big question...

What would they say about me?

Sometimes I find it hard to draw a distinction in my motivations between doing stuff because it's the right thing to do and it'll make someone else feel good, and doing it so people will like me, think well of me. I really tried to give that stuff up long ago, and have been fortunate to find that in many cases if you do the former, the latter will follow. But I don't want to overly trust my motivation because it seems easy to slip into doing unselfish things for selfish reasons.

So I guess I'd like to hope that lots of people will come and say lots of nice things about me, but I think it's better if I kind of don't care. Being a good person is more important than being well-liked in the larger scheme of things, and you can't really control how anyone feels about you anyway. And if you don't believe that, how good are you a controlling your own feelings about other people?

Feel The Beat

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I've complained about how every "R&B" song has the same beat and is therefore boring. I've reconsidered. And I've amended my opinion to include the idea that this is perhaps a conscious strategy, to mine every last dollar out of a particular microstyle of music and then move on once it runs dry. Kind of like the aliens in Independence Day without the cool space ships and death ray.

I got 3 Mitch Hedberg CDs for my birthday and if you've never heard him, I highly recommend him, though he's definitely not to everyone's taste. My favorite so far: "A friend of mine showed me a picture and said, 'This is a picture of me when I was younger.' Every picture is of you when you were younger. If you show me a picture of you when you're older, I'll say, let me see that @#$%^&*! camera."

Bar Mitzvah Report

Reader Discretion Advised - Contains some complaints and downright whining

I had the opportunity to attend a Bar Mitzvah this weekend in New Jersey. It was an upscale affair, with a Beatles theme (when I was a kid, the theme was always "Bar Mitzvah"). The room was decorated in a very cool way and the music was excellent and the DJ's dancers were early rounders from So You Think You can Dance. The kids were cute and funny and had a really good time. Everything was well done and terrific and I hated it.

It was nothing about this specific event. I've never been to one of these parties where I wasn't generally put out. I tried to figure out why, aside from the ridiculous music volume (I'm sorry, does anybody really want it that loud), and the best thing I could come up with is that I have issues with authority. I don't like people telling me what to do. "Get up!" "Dance" "Raise Your Arms Up" "All the men on the floor!" "Everybody up here for a picture!" And if someone tells me to do something and I don't, I really do not want the next words out of their mouth to be "Come on..."

Plus it's always the same. Who decided that a half hour of a party should be devoted to lighting candles? All good parties have their own momentum and nothing kills momentum like sitting for 30 minutes and listening to an extended Academy Award acceptance speech. That's why they have reminder music at the Oscars, but here they play the music and then the honoree just starts right up again as soon as the music's over. So if it's always the same and they play the music too loud to talk to anyone (I swear I'm bringing earplugs next time), what do I do?

Unfortunately, I'm no longer allowed to do what I did when I was younger, which is to misbehave. I saw lots of kids behaving miserably but everyone thought it was cute. Nobody would think it was cute if I laid down on my back on the stage and started screaming. Why is that? I'm just as cute as any 5 year-old. But I can't even act like I want to misbehave because it will upset people. And I don't even get a hoodie.

Okay, I've said it. Now I feel better.

Monday Brain Dump

Had a birthday 2 weeks ago. I'm now a bit more than 7 1/2 in dog years.

Here's my update on living in our new home:

People have kind of settled in and figured out how to live with what we've got. If this means carrying desks from room to room or accepting that it's not physically possible to walk around the classroom, so be it. For a not very organized person such as myself, the worst part is getting to the other building and then realizing that you've forgotten something. On the positive side, we had a nice chance to use the outdoor space at the school today for Israeli dancing and balloon animals, allowing us to hear music during lunch and popping balloons for the rest of the day.

As for the teaching side of things, we seem to have gotten past the whole white board controversy and now feel that we can write with impunity.

This past week I decided I would take the other staircase (known affectionately as Stairs 2) to see if I saw different people there, and I did. It's maybe a little scruffier over on that side of the building, though I don't think it has anything specifically to do with the stairs. In fact, the staircases are completely blank. No decoration, no message boards, though in Stairs 1, there's a wall of glass bricks that is blindingly bright in the morning.

Do you get the sense that I'm running out of things to talk about? It's a building. Buildings don't change quickly (as long as the architects didn't make any rounding errors). I've managed to cover my new desk with unsorted paper, and we still have good coffee in our office, but sometimes it feels like we're just passing though the building, while at the old place it kind of felt like we were living there (though, of course, we were not the only life forms living there). Maybe I'll have more of a sense for it once we have more than 2 school days in a row at some point.

Greetings of the Season

One of my favorite things about Halloween is that you get to see ads containing the word, "Spooktacular."

In fact, I will personally eschew using the actual word and use only "spooktacular" between now and November 1.

Any more advertising speak I ought to be incorporating into my vernacular?

And speaking of ads, is there any other baseball fan out there who is ready to tear down every DirecTV dish they see until they stop running that "Poltergeist" commercial. It's on 3-5 times, every single game. Ugh! Don't buy the media if you don't have enough material to run. Even a clever concept gets tired if you beat people over the head with it.

Speaking as a Spectator

Is there anything that can compare with the experience of watching a middle school field hockey game?

Matt Bleeping Stairs

I've been playing Rotisserie baseball for 25 years now, since the year the original book came out and probably 10 years before anyone invented the name "fantasy sports." It's an American League-only league, which is nice because I can root for the Phillies without having to root against my own team. This also means that I know every player in the league. of course, most of them are just stat lines to me, not personalities. Matt Stairs is different, I guess just because he's such an unlikely-looking player. Watching him run after a ball in right field is pretty comical, similar to the way John Kruk used to run. And he was always a mid-season pickup in our league when you had an injured player and needed to add some home runs. So I couldn't be happier for the guy. It's my favorite personal story so far this year.

I should also add, I don't think I've ever heard a player interviewed after hitting a home run and having them say, "Yeah, I was trying to hit it out." They always mumble something about just trying to make good contact, or looking for a pitch to drive, because it's bad form, I guess, to be swinging for home runs. And every baseball interview has been ruined for me by Bull Durham, so this is very refreshing.

I was afraid if I started on baseball I'd never stop, but here's just one more thing- just as important as the home runs was the pitching performance of Eyre and Madson in the 6th inning. The Phillies could have fallen apart after yet another atrocious Ryan Howard error, but Eyre and Madson got out of a second and third, nobody out situation without giving up even one more run. I don't have the relevant books on runs scored in these situations, but I know that if you have a runner on 3rd and nobody out he scores over 90% of the time, and I think the average runs scored from that situation is around 2. So stopping them there was key. As lousy as it felt being behind, it was only 2 runs.

Baseball Blogging

I haven't written much about baseball because there's such an overload of baseball-related material online that I can't imagine that I have much to add, but I went to the first 2 LCS games and so I guess I'll give it a try.

Here are a few postseason observations:

I don't care how much people boo him and I'm certainly not rooting for him at this time, but I enjoy watching Manny Ramirez hit more than anyone else in baseball.

The Phillies have gone this far with zippo from Howard, and if that doesn't show you they're a TEAM, then nothing will.

The most important play in the NLCS game 1 was Victorino busting it down the line to force the hurried throw from Furcal. The previous inning, we were talking about how dominant Lowe was, and then he just suddenly lost it. Baseball's odd in that it's the only sport where the defense has the ball, and if the guy taking care of the ball falters, the entire game changes in a heartbeat.

During game 1, the Phanatic smashed a Dodger helmet with dreadlocks hanging off the back. When asked about it, the guy who plays the Phanatic said, "I had some dreadlocks in my office and..." Anybody else out there able to make that statement?

I'm always grateful to get through a game and not see some now word that really starts with 'f' started with 'ph.'

People actually take a rooting interest in the cartoon train race they sometimes show during pitching changes.

They did "Guess the Attendance" at game 2 and the choices ranged from 45,200 to 45,800. They must have thought there was too much skill involved when they spread them out a bit more. "Naw, there couldn't possible be more than 45,600 people here!" BTW, crowds are slightly smaller than during the regular season because they've made one whole section into an extra press box.

And finally, if you missed the Red Sox-Rays Game 2, you missed something special And did you know they have a big tank out beyond centerfield with actual rays in it?

Gatekeepers

I remember the Watergate scandal, well enough to know that there was no actual gate involved, but I never anticipated that every political scandal from that moment on would get the word "gate" attached to the end.

Politics as Unusual

I'm not that old, but I've lived through a number of elections and this one is odd by any calculation. We have a historically unpopular (for excellent reasons) lame duck president, and a black man who defeated a former First Lady running against a cranky old guy and his running mate, who, depending on who you talk to, is either unfit or merely unprepared for the vice presidency. And thanks to the Internet the whole affair is public in real time with an absolute flood of information and commentary.

So this brings us to the big question. Why are there undecided voters and who in the world are they? I was thinking about this watching the debate last night and hearing mostly familiar talking points and wondering if there was anyone hearing this stuff for the first time. I mean, 42 % of the TV audience was watching the debate and were they really seeing something new? You really have to be consciously avoiding information to, for example, not know Obama's position on Iraq. I mean, I know all about Project Runway without watching it, just by being alive in America. It's cultural osmosis. Can you really miss all this stuff just by not being interested?

So it seems to me that these people must be doing this on purpose. Perhaps they're desperately lonely and crying out for attention, so they really like getting phone calls from both sides. Maybe there's money in it. I'm sure they're all hoping that the creators of "undecided voter" focus groups will seek them out and ask them to be on TV or to hold the little dials that CNN gives to those mysterious people in Ohio. As Henslowe says in Shakespeare in Love, I don't know. It's a mystery.

Update

I swear I didn't see this (from The Daily Show) until after I'd written the above...

John Oliver polls undecided voters (a large portion of which fall squarely in the 'stupid' category) to find out what issues are important to them.

"Let's look at the latest numbers. Right now, nationwide, it's Obama 49, McCain 43, Undecided 8. Those Undecideds can still break either way. But who are they? As you can see, they fall into a variety of categories: Attention seekers; racist Democrats; the chronically insecure; and "the stupid. That is 45% of the Undecideds, John. They are the swingiest of the swing voters. And they, as they always do, will decide this election."

I Can't Help Myself

I don't understand how people can actually have a serious conversation about Sarah Palin without suddenly breaking out in uncontrollable laughter. I have never seen anything like this. There's a part of Isaac Asimov's classic "Foundation" trilogy where a diplomat from the powerful people comes to visit the planet of the less powerful (sorry for the lack of detail, it's been probably 30 years since I read it). He does a great deal of talking during this time and when he leaves the general feeling is that he was supportive and consrtuctive and that relations will be better. Then linguists analyzed what he actually said and found that everything he said was canceled out by something else he said and that in total, he had said absolutely nothing. I felt this way sometimes during the vice presidential debate.

Those grueling two-day weeks

I know everyone's waiting to read my continuing saga of the New School Building (actually I know no such thing, but it sounds good), so here goes.

The biggest change in the "school life" seems to be the cafeteria and lunchroom. The room is beautiful- bright and spacious. It's a pleasure to be in there. And having actual food available for lunch has altered the way people come to school. I'm not sure if anyone anticipated how many people would want to buy their meals. The food is good, but what's more interesting is how everyone ends up in this nice room together at the same time. As much as the larger/split quarters is missing the intimacy of the old school, having a community gathering point helps to bring everyone together.

For the faculty, who have a nice little side area with booths reserved for them, it has turned out to be a great opportunity to spend time together. I've eaten lunch and talked at length with people I've never said more than "Hi" to in the past. It's such a nice thing that I actually have nothing snarky to say about it. Oh, wait. How about, we've gotten to spend so much time together that the topic of conversation has moved beyond "what route did you take to get here and how long did it take you?" There, that feels better. I actually did learn a better route from one of these conversations.

On other fronts, there's still plenty of discussion about how tight the classrooms are. The big thing, for the teachers at least, is the white boards. There's something not quite right about them. Not as far as the color is concerned. They're white. But certain markers, almost unpredictably, seem determined that their markings will live on forever. And the erasers that came with the boards do no such thing. This has led to the creation of a family of urban legends about what kinds of markers to use and how to erase them.

Some of the classrooms are not carpeted and have rolling chairs for the teachers. This is great fun. I can easily propel myself from one end of the room to the other, (I have a lot of practice from late night chair races back in my advertising days). I'm looking forward to developing a technique to draw full board-length parallel lines in Geometry.

On Friday I got all the way to the athletic building for a class without The Phantom Tollbooth and had to scurry back and fetch it. That's a long way to scurry.

Sightseeing

I went to the Royal Dockyards today. They refer to themselves as the "most visited sight in Bermuda." The place was completely deserted. I wonder how the second most visited sight was doing. There was even a huge cruise ship in the harbor.

The Dockyards are a former British fortress, abandoned relatively recently. A big chunk is a museum and the rest is, you guessed, shopping! I walked around the grounds of the museum without entering any of the buildings. In spite of this approach, I can tell you with absolute certainty that inside the buildings are models of ships, photographs of ships, pieces of ships, things that used to be on ships, paintings of ships, and pictures of and stories about people who used to work on ships. There, I've saved you the same kind of time I saved myself.

My favorite thing I saw was in the bathroom. The electric had dryer had a sign on it that said, "This hand dryer is censored. Place hands under dryer to start blower." I've very much against censorship, but here I'll make an exception.

Just One, Please

I think it takes a certain, peculiar type of person to enjoy traveling alone. I don't have any illusions about my own peculiarity, but it's interesting that it works well with traveling.

Traveling by itself involves getting lots of curious looks from people. Restaurants obviously would rather fill a table for two with 2 people, not one. Last night I sat in the restaurant where I was the only solo diner and the only person at a table with an odd number of people (you have time to notice this kind of stuff when you're alone). You have to not feel uncomfortable in a situation like that, because it happens all the time. When I arrived here, the customs guy sent me to get my bags searched, rather than just waving me through. I asked him, "What did I do to deserve this?" but I know the answer, I didn't have my family with me. Who's gonna check a 52 year-old schoolteacher traveling with a wife and 2 kids? But the same guy by himself, and not on business, stands out enough to get noticed.

Business travel is the best preparation for that kind of treatment, and I have plenty of experience with that. In fact, a business hotel, weekdays in a busy downtown area or at an airport, is the only place you can be by yourself and not feel out of place.

I'll talk more about the kinds of feelings this evokes later- I've only been away for 24 hours.

The View

I don't think we see the horizon enough. I guess people who live in hilly areas never see the horizon, but seeing it conveys something about the scale of things. There are plenty of reminders in the world of how small we are, but this is a particularly gentle and pleasant one.

Ow, It Hurts!

Painful as it may be to admit, US Airways was right. I'm in Bermuda right now to get a little bit of the rest I never got over the summer. The forecast yesterday was for the weather to be terrible here- 50+ mph winds and rain, and I thought I might like to change my flight to tomorrow, but US Airways said they weren't ready to waive their penalty, so I decided to wait and see, and it all worked out okay.

Go Phillies!

Four-eyes

There's something that seems exceptionally dorky about texting wearing reading glasses.

Back to some school or another

We're a 3 school family, including the one where I work, and so I have the privilege this week of doing 3 so-called back-to-school nights in 4 days. I've never been quite sure to whom the "back-to-school" part is referring, the students or the parents, but I guess that's not important.

This is an exhausting experience by any measure, but it will put me in the unique position of comparing the highs and lows of parent communication at three of the area's finest independent schools. I'll check back in later.

And on the menu today...

Is Mushroom Barely Soup actually Mushroom Barley Soup or Barely Mushroom Soup?

A Quick Dip Into Politics

My favorite line about Sarah Palin's incessant lying about everything from "Troopergate" to the Bridge to Nowhere to her own pay is anything that starts, "Sarah Palin, if that's her real name..."

What Happened to the Bloom on that Rose?

One of the first things I train my students to do is to not just raise their hand and call out, "I don't understand." My response to that is always, "What is it that you don't understand?" They are expected to think through and formulate a question. "Why does it equal 3?" for example. That's a question that can be answered and it's not one that's beyond the ability of a middle-schooler to ask.

It's a mindset of who's primarily responsible for a child's education and what are the goals of a school. Clearly, the ultimate responsibility is with the child. The teacher is there to facilitate and to help the student learn to learn. Obviously, more is expected of a 12th grader than a 7th grader, but the earlier good expectations and goals are established, the more sense the whole process makes to the students when they're required to learn new skills. That's why, when students ask the old "what I am I ever going to need this for?" question, I often respond "Nothing, but your life will be better in many ways if you understand math."

So we're in the second week in the new school and people are kind of settling in. This is a process that seems to repeat for people at various points in their life. A major change takes place and is met with some level of giddiness and dread and optimism and curiosity and adrenaline. Then there's a stage where information begins to overtake infatuation and people begin to make adjustments. Many of us have had experiences like this with personal relationships and we're in that stage here at the new school.

The most obvious example is the behavior of the seniors. In the old building, there was a senior lounge of sorts. Some of the lockers were in there and there were a couple of couches where the students often lounged in inappropriate proximity to each other. There's nothing like that in the new building. So the seniors appropriated this odd area underneath two crossing staircases and turned it into a lounge. The administration keeps threatening to take it away, but so far it's still there.

On a less picturesque basis, there are all sorts of petty annoyances here. They really are petty, so we all overlooked them for the first week and eventually they'll either be taken care of or we'll internalize them and won't notice anymore. But for the moment, the lack of copiers and available computers and the transsoundancy (? whatever the sound version of transparency is) of the walls in the Athletic Building and the tightness of some of the classrooms are getting on people's (students and teachers alike) nerves.

This brings me back to my point about how people respond to major change. Permanent infatuation is not an option. The only way for a new relationship to endure is if you want it to. As you gather information, there are always plenty of reasons to reject and turn away, but if you want to make something succeed, you can learn to sort out what's important and what's not, to formulate questions and seek solutions rather than complaining, and to keep your ultimate goals in mind. The new school building isn't perfect, but nothing is. If we keep our minds on the ultimate goal of creating a first class educational institution, a lot of the annoyances become just background noise. I make it a point, especially with the students, to truly listen to their concerns, to empathize with them, but to never be negative about the way things are and where we're headed.

Modern Living

I just did something I bet you didn't do today. I vacuumed my freezer. All I'll say is that it involved grated parmesan cheese.

Getting Ready For The Second Week

When I think about going back to school this week, the first thing I think of is that I have to bend down to unlock the door. I'm not very tall, so either the card reader's too low or the shoelace holding my card is too short. We have these funny little ID cards that have our heads peering out of a white background. They're supposed to open the doors, take attendance for the kids, and debit our meal accounts. We found out quickly that they meal part doesn't work, so now our cards are actually two cards pasted together. I'm not sure I know anyone else who has this kind of thing.

For me, the biggest problem, if you can call it that, is that I don't see everyone every day the way I used to. When there were only 2 floors in the main wing and only 2 staircases, I saw pretty much every student multiple times each day and most of the teachers as well. Now, I'm not even sure how many staircases there are, and the classes are on 3 floors in one building and 3 in another, so it's become less certain that I'll see all the people I like.

My only other complaint, and I promise I'll stop here, is getting there. I've been incredibly spoiled. When I ran my own little advertising shop, my office was 1.1 miles from home. The old school was 1.1 miles in the opposite direction, so I haven't had a commute of more than 4 minutes since 1993. Even when I lived in LA, my commute was 3 miles through a beautiful canyon and then 5 miles down Pacific Coast Highway. How do people do this every day for years? It's awful. And I'm only going about 6 miles on reasonable attractive suburban roads. I hope I can get used to it. The nice thing is that I have every important shopping spot on the Main Line right on my way home. I look forward to stimulating my area's economy.

Things I really like, aside from the obvious things like beautiful grounds (a 'duck' pond, sans ducks) and air conditioning, are, in no particular order, free coffee for teachers at Starbucks, bells that don't make me cringe and/or jump 3 feet in the air when I hear them, matching desks in our office (we're now on our second set of desktops, but they still all match each other), which used to be a workout room (and we have a mirror wall to prove it), 2 mezuzas in the classrooms with 2 doors, all kinds of unfinished high tech looking things that promise all sorts of excitement, and of course, the kids, who are just as great in the new place as they were in the old.

I'm sure there will be plenty to report on in the days to come, so stay tuned.

David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

I'm not really an avid reader of great writers. It's too much work and I possess too much of that impossible combination of laziness and freneticness that dogs many people in my generation to sit down and read a 1000+ page novel, half of which is written in 6 point type footnotes. But just reading two collections of his essays was enough to establish David Foster Wallace in my mind as one of the great living writers. He had an unsurpassed command of all aspects of the English language and displayed such sharp wit and observational skill that it is a huge pleasure to read any sentence he's written. I can't do him any justice by writing about him. I'm just terribly sad he's gone. Here's an overly lengthy excerpt from E Unibus Pluram, an essay he wrote about how totally wrong writers are when they think they are voyeurs gathering observations of humanity by watching television:

Illusion (1) is that we're voyeurs at all: the "voyees" behind the screen's glass are only pretending ignorance. They know perfectly well we're out there...What we see is far from stolen; it's proffered- illusion (2). And, illusion (3)...what young writers are scanning for data on some reality to fictionalize is already formed composed of fictional characters in highly formalized narratives. And, (4), we're not even seeing "characters" at all: it's not Major Frank Burns, pathetic self-important putz from Ft. Wayne, Indiana; it's Larry Linville of Ojai, California, actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters from pseudo-voyeurs berating him for being a putz from Ft. Wayne. And then (5) it's not even actors we're espying, not even people; it's electromagnetic-propelled analog waves and ion streams...throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not much more lifelike than Seurat's own post-Impressionist commentaries on perceptual illusion. Good Lord, and (6) the dots are coming out of our furniture, all we're really spying on is our own furniture, and our very own chairs and lamps sit visible but unseen...

Many of his essays, describing everything from luxury Caribbean cruised or getting caught in a tornado while playing tennis, are funny. But it's his quest for truth and insight and his ability to translate that into written words that made him exceptional. I'm really saddened by his death. And I will finally get around to reading his 1000+ page novel.

The First Week of School

I know that some of you will want some help in describing the first week of school, so I'm here to give you a hand.

Let's start with the building. The building is beautiful. It still looks kind of like a conference center, albeit a conference center for small people carrying books around and cramming lots of stuff into little metal compartments. I think that will change over time, though it may take longer than we'd expect, given the administration's insistence on keeping it clean. We'll see. The laws of nature are pretty insistent on everything approaching a state of entropy, or complete disorder, but at least we can try.

For me personally, there are a few things that stick out. First, my office is on the ground floor, which is arguable a basement but I won't quibble. Most of my classes are on the 3rd floor. There's an elevator but I refuse to use it, and I am already developing quads of steel. Our department head had the inspiration to refuse to have our room carpeted, which makes my nice new chair with wheels much more fun than I would have anticipated. There's a large gap in the wall that separates my desk from the guidance office, but I haven't heard anything exciting yet.

The door to our office is always locked and they installed the lock wrong so you can't unlock it. So they took the glass pane out of the door and if the door is closed you have to reach through and open it with the inside handle. There are a few classrooms like that. Apparently they installed the cylinders upside down. Now I know all you math people will say, "How can you install a cylinder upside down? That's like saying you drew a circle upside down. It's symmetrical." I don't know, it's a mystery.

The biggest complaint I've heard so far is that the building is big and spacious, but the classrooms are cramped. I guess that's kind of true, but I don't think it's anything that you can't get used to. I really like the rooms that have 2 doors. It adds an element of surprise to things.

The other complaint is that there's a walk between the 2 buildings. I don't think this is unique to the school. In most cases, if there's two separate buildings you must walk to get from one to the other. It's not a long walk, but it's not a short walk either. We have a bunch of umbrellas, but sometimes, if there are lots of people in transit, one building or the other runs out and students are late because they're waiting for an umbrella. I know there's a oke here but I can't put my finger on it. As for finding a way to get the students from one building to the other more quickly, my first suggestion would be to use pressurized pneumatic tubes, like they use at the drive-in tellers. This is how the first subway in New York operated. Huge fans created air pressure to move the trains. (No, I'm not making this up). If that's not practical, a moving sidewalk will do.

People are concerned because kids aren't staying on the crosswalks. This suggests to me that the crosswalks are not placed correctly. Especially in inclement weather, people will always choose the shortest distance to walk. If the crosswalk isn't there, they won't stay on the crosswalk. Some of you may have heard me mention that when the University of California built their new campus in Santa Cruz. At UCSC, home of the Banana Slugs, (not making that one up either. Photo here), they build no paths the fist year. They waited to see where the students walked across the grass and built the paths there.

Be Afraid

I'm guessing I'm not alone in this, but when I was in my early to mid teens, there was nothing in the world more frightening than a group of pretty girls, walking together and talking very loud and very fast. Though I was, like most boys that age, completely stupid about almost everything, I knew this was something that I was attracted to but could not approach. I didn't need to be told that girls mature faster than boys. I could see it and feel it.

I'll be perfectly honest here and tell you that, even though I have teenage girls of my own and work with teenagers, I still refer to these groups as "scary teenage girls." I'm not in any way afraid of them and would be perfectly comfortable walking up and talking to them if I knew one of them. But somewhere there's still a part of me that remembers being 13 and scared to death.

This has been a long introduction to a short observation. I was at Starbucks this afternoon and as I came out I could hear the sound of one of these groups. Again, I'm around kids all day long, so it's not hard to recognize. But I looked over and these girls could not have been older than 11. But they were wearing makeup and jewelry and cool clothes and talking a mile a minute and they were like a miniature version of the real thing. And I thought, man, I thought it was scary when I was a kid, I have great sympathy in advance for the preteen male of the species.

Shu Mu

I suppose Whole Foods can call it whatever it wants to, but nothing with dried cranberries in it should really be called Mu Shu Chicken.

Off the Hook

I haven't written much about music lately. I'm sure there's plenty to say, but I simply do not listen to music as much during the baseball season, thanks mostly to that infernal XM radio, which broadcasts every game and has a baseball talk channel with lots of good hosts. But I do have some questions and comments.

First of all, can Rihanna sing? I've probably heard a dozen of her songs and I still don't know the answer. I can't say that she definitely can't sing, but I've heard no proof that she can either.

The next thing worries me, because it runs the risk of throwing me into old fogey territory. I don't understand how people don't get bored with the current pop out there. It's not that it's bad or unpleasant. Don't worry, I won't say "how could you listen to that noise?" which is what my parents (who were actually more tolerant than most) used to say. It just all sounds very similar. Every so-called R&B song has exactly the same beat. Most of the songs that have any real melody use the Ne-Yo, Chris Brown, weird synthesized voice. And whiny-boy rock hasn't changed since the 70's. Why do you need to own more than a couple of these? That's what makes songs like Sweet Escape stay popular for so long, because Gwen Stefani can actually sing and brings a unique personality. The only other things I like are fun novelty songs like "Low."

The number of American Idol finalists lurking around the top 20 is jarring. American Idol has a pernicious effect on pop music, because contestants have figured out that there's a formula for success, (eye contact, slow build, the big flourish). This can translate into actual pop success if the singer has any talent (like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and maybe Jordin Sparks), but Clarkson and Underwood didn't really follow the formula once they left the show. And you can't play to the camera on the radio.

Political

My favorite thing about the steady barrage of Sarah Palin oddities is that if you wanted to, you could make up something completely ridiculous about her or her family and if you told people they'd probably believe you.

Back To School

The words that send a chill up the spine of every self-respecting kid. For adults it's a bit more complicated, and for me even more so because I'm going back to school too.

So let's catch up. I had a lousy summer. No need to elaborate, we'll just stipulate that it was lousy and move on. My kids trickle back into their schools this week. What's with the first day half day thing? My kids go to two different schools and they both do it (on different days yet). T come up with a half day schedule, people have to be thinking, okay, we're going to disrupt everyone's nice summer lives by making them wake up at 6:15, but we don't want to give the parents the benefit of a full 6 hours without their kids. I guess this what we call "child-centered" thinking. To this I say "Bah, humbug." I have two teenagers and they do more than enough child-centered thinking for all of us. I don't need the school doing it too.

One of these schools even has a half day the last day before winter and spring breaks. This to me shows a distinct lack of decisiveness and generally muddled thinking.

"Should we have a day off before the vacation? No, that would be silly, but we don't want to start the vacation when the vacation would naturally start, because that might imply that we haven't been giving it any thought, so let's just make it a half day."

Or something like that.

For me personally, the start of school is a prolonged case of the butterflies. My style of teaching is very much dependent on my getting in sync with the class, and having to tune into 4 new classes at the same time is hard work. This year in particular, I'm teaching relatively few students that I've taught previously, and only 2 that I've taught for a full year. Last year, by contrast, I had taught nearly half of my students previously including one entire class. This is not a problem, really, but I'm always a bit on edge until the parents come through for back to school night.

On the other hand, it's exciting to be going to a new building and making a new start in a lot of ways. The first order of business will be to find the bathrooms. After that, anything goes. As teachers, we have either inservice, in service, or in-service, depending on who you talk to. That always seemed kind of gramatically sketchy to me. Should one have in-service or should one be in-service. I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "in" is.

Musical

We saw a show in Lake Placid called 5 Guys Named Moe. It's one of those shows pulled together around a bunch of songs, these being songs performed and in some cases written by Louis Jordan (much to the disappointment of some of our party who thought it would be songs of Charles Jourdan, the French crooner). It's not really much of a show. A guy alone in his apartment feeling sorry for himself and 5 guys named Moe jump out of his radio to help him get a handle on his life, make up with his girlfriend, etc. I'm not sure what it is they do to help him, aside from sing a lot of fun songs. Any show that has Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens is ok by me.

One of my favorite things I ever saw on TV was a bit on Candid Camera where they had a whole diner filled with singers and musicians (all hiding their instruments) and when an unsuspecting customer said something they all break into a musical number, like in a show. The waitress starts singing to him, people in booths take out violins and horns and an accordion, and other customers start to dance. Too bad life isn't really like that.

Unlimited Edition

I was walking through town today and saw what was called a "limited edition" poster. What exactly does that mean? Is there such a thing as an unlimited edition poster? How could that happen? It reminds me of some traditional advertising phrases. My favorite is "fresh-picked," as in "made with fresh-picked vegetables." Well, of course the vegetables were fresh when they were picked. Or hearth-baked. Hearth, of course, meaning oven. Where else would you bake something?

The Demolition Derby at the Essex County Fair

My wife and I went to the Essex County Fair. We couldn't coerce the kids into coming with us, so they went to the movies. I've always been a sucker for these kinds of things, but fortunately nobody else in my family is, so we rarely go. I don't know why I like them so much. I don't play the carnival games because I once read a book that explained in great detail how the odds are stacked against you. The rides are typically not that exciting and I always question the maintenance practices, and the carnies are not usually people you'd seek out for company. But it's always people watching beyond compare. Nobody dresses up for a county fair (except maybe the 4-H club baking contest types). Everyone's in their natural state and seem to be really there, as opposed to being one place and thinking about being somewhere else, as us metro area types are wont to do. It makes me feel like I'm really in the place I'm visiting, which makes me feel calm and grounded.

The attraction of this fair was a demolition derby. For those not familiar with these, a bunch of guys and gals drive a bunch of old junker cars with no windows or back seats into a contained area. On the count of 3 they begin to bash these cars into each other at whatever speed they can muster and continue until only one car can still move. These used to be on ABC's Wide World of Sports from time to time, back in the day, and they were always one of my favorites. Most so-called sports don't look like nearly so much fun.

My wife is a superb photographer, and she wanted to shoot the whole thing, from preparations through the event. We nixed buying a grandstand ticket as too limiting, and in all likelihood the grandstand was more pleasant to look at than to inhabit. It was whitewashed with a big fading red metal roof that oozed beaten down authenticity. But it was packed with a few hundred people, many of whom were eating french fries smothered in gravy. So we walked through the gate into the infield to where everyone was preparing their cars or heckling whoever was doing the preparations. An example of such preparations was the guy banging on the hood of his car with a sledge hammer to flatten out a bend. He then got up on it and started jumping up and down. There was an audience of about 10 guys for this, all offering advice, not all serious. It was clear that we did not belong in this area and equally clear that nobody could care less that we were there. I must say that this takes a bit of the fun out of sneaking in somewhere.

My wife went to do her photo thing. When she does this my main job is to not be in the photographs or in her way, so I steered away from her and just looked. As I was watching the Adirondack Trash Service Demo Team (they all had shirts) it occurred to me that I was sticking out like a sore thumb. It hadn't really occurred to me just who it was we were going to be hanging out with and I do not own the requisite outfit (trucker hat, t-shirt with either the name of a garage of a borderline obscene saying on it, loose, knee to calf-length denim shorts, hemmed or cut off and some kind of boots, shoes or sneakers the color of the dirt). Just so you can picture this, I was wearing a light blue and white horizontal striped Hugo Boss crew neck tee, stone J. Crew shorts, and bright white running shoes (brand new for the triathalon).

On one hand, these were not people I was really going to mingle with. I've been in a few places and can say that it's hard to find purer white trash than in upstate New York. On the other hand, I was there with them and they were fine and I was the one who looked stupid and out of place. This made me feel very alone and even to question my worth as a human being. Well, not really, but I did feel like a total outsider. I felt more at home in Paris where people ask me directions all the time and unless they speak English I just have to shrug.

I watched a pallet carrier picking up wrecked cars and loading them onto a flatbed (there'd been a round of this before we arrived). It was a little hard to tell the competitors from the aftermath, but finally a few of them lined up and it was time to start. We got a spot by the fence in with one of the "teams" and watched 12 cars drive into an area about 25 feet by 200 feet, closed off by movable concrete barriers. I always though it'd be fun to have a car that you could crash into a barrier and not care. The surface was soft dirt. The cars were all painted with numbers and company names and with shout outs to friends and family, living and dead, and snappy sayings like, "Hit me here." Then the countdown and a huge racket (so loud!) and off they went, smashing into each other left and right.

I remember from my viewing days that the strategy was to ram with your rear because the radiator was the weak spot, and once the radiator is smashed, the engine dies soon after. However, an alternate strategy uses the fact that the front end is heavier to so demolish the rear of the other car to the point where the wheels can no longer turn. It's fun to watch a car try to move (and on soft dirt it can) when the front wheels turn but the rear wheels do not.

One other guy had a car that ran fine but he was pushed at an angle so tightly into a corner that he couldn't move. He kept trying to go back and forth to extract himself, showering those of us close to him with dirt. A few of the others were disabled quickly, mostly by Bill, the guy in car 43, who was moving much faster and with more obvious glee than anyone else. Eventually #43 died too, but not without smashing his lone remaining competitor and claiming first prize for his aggression. It turned out that we were standing among Bill's buddies and he got cheers and backslaps when he came over holding a trophy and a check.

We then watched them drag all the wrecked cars out of the ring, after people had loaded all of the car parts in through where the windows had been. It was mostly bumpers and fenders, but there was a wheel attached to half an axle as well. And then they drove another dozen cars in and did it all over again. The highlight of this one was one car that pretty much had it's entire rear end knocked off, except for the wheels. We were a bit concerned for the driver. The safety equipment in these cars consists of a seat belt and a couple of bars inserted in key spots to keep the roof from collapsing if the car rolls (none of them did). To compensate, there were 4 fire engines and 3 ambulances waiting trackside. But everyone was okay and eventually someone won.

There was one more "heat," though heat implies that there's a final and of course all the competitors' cars were destroyed, so I'm not sure how that would work. Everyone in the grandstand stayed put, but we left.

Renting

It's a dream of mine to own a house in Lake Placid, though it doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. So in the meantime we rent.

We've always rented houses on the smaller lake here, called Mirror Lake. The village of Lake Placid, like a majority of the lake towns here, is not on the lake it's named for. Saranac Lake sits on the shores of Lake Flower, Tupper Lake isn't on a lake at all. And Lake Placid is on Mirror Lake.

It's odd spending 2 weeks in someone else's house. Many of the rental houses here are truly set up for the task. There's a full array of sturdy stuff for the renters and all the good stuff is squirreled away in a couple of locked rooms and closets.

The house we're staying at is clearly not primarily a rental property. The owner's stuff is everywhere, there's no touristy information to be found, and nothing's locked up. We've found at least 5 junk drawers full of assorted stuff. This makes it kind of homey and kind of curious too. How do you have a kitchen without measuring spoons? Why are there over 100 sandwich plates and 8 bowls? Why 3 kitchen cabinets full of glasses? Why are there large open boxes or trash bags in 3 different places, and for that matter, why are there 3 garbage pails in the kitchen? I wonder if every time they have something in their regular home that they don't want or need anymore they just deposit it here.

And then there's the eternal question. Why are all the doors so squeaky? I can't remember the last time I rented a place and didn't have to run right to the store to get WD-40. Every single door in this house squeaked loudly when we arrived. I'm proud to say that none of them do now.

Political Correctness in the Adirondacks

I was shocked today to find that Dump Road, otherwise known as the entrance to the Lake Placid Waste Management facility, has been rechristened Recycling Circle.

Make Your Body Move

I did something yesterday that I'm struggling to sum up in an adjective. Exhilarating? Difficult? Crazy? A bit of all those things, but the only word that really captures it is "triathalon."

Technically, this is what would be known as a mini-triathalon. You swim 400 yards, bike 12 miles and then run 3 miles. They have these things every Monday night in Lake Placid through mid-August. Last year I didn't find out about them until the day before the last one and I had neither run nor swam at all that summer. So I chickened out. This summer, although I'm not in nearly as good a shape as I was last summer, I did swim a bunch of laps and even ran a few times so that I could participate. I even did all 3 in succession once.

So here's the experience. Before we even get there, I look in the paper and see the results from the prior week. I know approximately how fast I can do this, about 10 minutes for the swim, 45 minutes for the bike and 30 for the run and about 5 minutes for changes. This puts me about 10 minutes behind that last person (out of 8) in my age group to finish. There were a few older women who were a bit slower, but that's it. I manage to convince myself that this would give me the 9th best time of all the many 50-59 year-olds in Lake Placid, which is pretty good. So I arrive for sign-up and there are about 150 people there, of all ages and mostly very fit looking. I sign up and they scawl a number on my arm and leg and give me a bathing cap with a number on it as well. Many people are wearing official-lookng triathalon gear and a bunch have wet suits (!) on. At this point it's about 45 minutes until the things starts, so I arrange my towel, bicycle and related equipment, and running shoes in neat (for me) little piles and then spend the next 40 minutes fretting.

I had decided at this point that I was gooing to be that guy in the Olympics who comes staggering into the arena 20 minutes after everyone else has finished and the crowd give him a standing ovation. My wife thinks that's funny and is very supportive of my going ahead and doing this.

So it's finally time to start. We begin with an open water swim. I like swimming in lakes, though the water is often cold. I do not, however, ever try to swim for distance and/or speed. I tried swimming for exercise a few years ago but gave it up quickly. I am, let's just say, a competent swimmer. I can swim. But swimming for exercise is the most boring thing in the world. Swimming is only interesting to the extent that the fear of drowning keeps your mind active, but if you're in a pool that fear vanishes much to quickly to sustain interest. The only exercise I like less than swimming is Stairmaster. Whose idea was this, to simulate walking up stairs? Who likes doing that? I always figure if I dislike doing something in real life, I'm not going to enjoy simulating the activity on a machine.

Anyway, off we go, 150 of us diving into the lake, which is not too terribly cold. I try to go out nice and easy, but with all the adrenaline of the start and the energy required to avoid kicking feet, I find myself pretty winded after 100 yards. This is not good. Swimming laps, you can always pause and take a breath as you turn. Not the case in open water. So I spend the next 300 yards trying to breathe. Now, not being able to breathe is interesting, so I'm not bored on this swim. I figured in advance that I could do breast stroke for a bit if I couldn't keep doing the crawl, but breast stroke is very slow, even if you're good at it, and I wasn't expecting to do 300 yards of it. So once the good swimmers clear out, I start doing the backstroke. It's easy to breathe when you're on your back, but it's hard to see, which is also not boring. I bump into one person, but mostly I notice that the dozen or so people behind me have observed what I'm doing and many of them start doing it as well. I keep churning away and after a very long 10 minutes, I find myself back on shore.

I'm wet and breathing very hard and my wife is cheering me on and random people are saying "good job!" and my daughter is yelling at me not to walk up to my bicycle because everyone else is RUNNING. I succumb to the pressure and trot. I dry myself enough to get my shirt and my bike shoes on and off I go.

Before I signed up for this, I was wondering what to wear. The guy who runs the events told me that triathalon shorts were best. They're like bike shorts but with light padding so you can swim and run in them. I was startled to find out that I had accidentally bought a pair of these a couple of years ago, thinking they were just lightly padded bike shorts. But in fact they are easy to swim in and not too bad for running either, once you get over the fact that you don't wear anything under them. This makes perfect sense, intellectually, but back in the day we called this "going commando" or "freesyle" and I never got into it.

The bike ride was fine. It's a variation of a route that I've done many times before. I know all the hills and know I can do them. There's a road that runs along the Ausable River for about 4 miles and it is probably my favorite place to ride in the whole world. So I'm loving it, but there's always a little voice in my head saying, "This would be great if I didn't have to run 3 miles when I'm done with this." I got through the ride, even the one hill that I despise (it ends at a traffic light so you climb climb climb and then you have to stop.

I arrive back, get words of encouragement and a kiss from my wife and put my running shoes on and I'm off again. I haven't run this route because I don't run. I used to run but I've gained a bit of weight and lost a bit of cartilage in my knees and flexibility in my muscles, so it's not really fun anymore. So all I know about the course is that it goes along the lake, which is flat, and then up Mt. Whitney Rd. I make the assumption that Mt. Whitney Rd. goes up, which turns out to be correct. It's a mile of steady uphill. The nice thing about this is that it's downhill coming back. I've always liked courses that are downhill for the second half. I actually pass 2 people during the run and one person passes me near the finish line and then I'm done.

It took me exactly an hour and 30 minutes (unofficially). The swim took 10 minutes, the ride took 45 minutes and the run took 30 minutes. My daughter is blown away by the precision of this and I'm pleased to have finished. I'm sore and tired but not beyond comprehension. And so I've done it. I didn't wimp out and I even didn't finish last.

Best Thing Ever

How did I not know about this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/technology/personaltech/07basics.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=power%20tools&st=cse&oref=slogin

Olympics!

The Olympics begin tomorrow. The opening ceremonies are tomorrow night. I'm curious to see if I can stay awake until the end. Until a few years ago the ceremony was mostly the parade of athletes and then a display of national pride by the host country followed by the lighting of the torch. Now it's like a long performance art piece, but with the TV people explaining what's going on. If you need TV people to tell you what's going on, it's not very good performance art. Four years ago, any time I heard Bob Costas refer to the "child of hope" or something like that, I'd make involuntary retching noises. I seem to remember there was ice skating involved. Or maybe that was the winter olympics. Man I'm getting old.

Reassurance and incipient disaster

I just read that Mary-Kate Olsen said she had nothing to do with Heath Ledger's death. I just wanted to make one thing clear: neither did I. I presume from the context that they had some kind of relationship, but lacking the necessary background to know that, it seemed like the most random bit of quotery I can recall seeing recently. It reminds me of Chevy Chase on the original Saturday Night Live Weekend Update. "this just in, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead." Same goes for Heath Ledger, may he rest in peace (though I highly doubt that will happen).

I also just saw that they found over 100,000 gorilla's living in a "gorilla paradise" in the Republic of Congo. To quote the great philosopher Don Henley, you call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.

New Restaurant

Went out to dinner for my wife's birthday last night, to the brand new Parc restaurant on Rittenhouse Square. It's a new Stephen Starr restaurant, and as such has a clear theme. This one is a Paris bistro. Having been in Paris a few months ago, I can report that it is a perfect knockoff. It looks like it's been around for 100 years, even though it opened 2 weeks ago. This strikes me as an interesting job, making something brand new look old. Parts of it, of course, can be accomplished simply by furnishing with old things, including mismatched chairs and bathroom fixtures with age-cracked porcelin. But it would seem like at least something in the place has to be bought new and made to look old.

There were only a couple of things that seemed different to me. First there's the size. This place is immense. It must seat 500 people. It's easily twice the size of any place I've ever been in Paris. The second thing is the noise. I'm not sure that I've ever been in a louder restaurant. My ears were ringing for an hour after we left. The waitress (a third difference is the service was very friendly) had to come to both sides of a table for 4 to take our order and I still only heard half of what she said. The wine steward told me that they'd hired an acoustician to try to improve things. The food was excellent, though, and I'd definitely go back.

I should also mention that the people eating and drinking there (and it was packed, inside, outside and at the bar) were the most attractive group that I've seen in a Philly restaurant. It made me feel much better looking than I really am just being there. When we came out there was an orange Lamborghini two seat convertible sitting at the curb. I'm sure I'd be even better looking if I was driving that thing.

Hello again

Yeah I know I haven't written anything for a while. There's a good reason for that. I really haven't had much to say. It doesn't take much to get my brain whirling, but there hasn't been much of anything since we got back from Chicago. My days wrap around my daughter's health and it keeps everything within a pretty small range of activity.

Running

I want to do a mini-triathalon in a couple of weeks. It's a quarter miles swim, 12 mile bike ride and 5k run. Today I decided to try running a bit. If you're a middle aged guy and you really want to feel mortal, try running after not having done so for a while. I'm not in terrible shape and I can ride my bike all day, but people my age were not meant to run (evolutionarily speaking, people my age aren't meant to be alive, so running probably wasn't so important back in the old days). It just doesn't really work any more.

I used to run a fair amount, but now I decided I should concentrate on being able to run the maximum useful distance for my life. I estimate this to be about a quarter of a mile. This would allow me to run for a bus or a train, get out of the rain in all but the most isolated settings, and escape imminent danger. I don't really know why else I would need to run.

Back Home Again

Just in time for a big thunderstorm and losing electricity for 21 hours. I think lightning struck a tree on our block, which in turn knocked a couple of branches from another tree onto the the power lines. So we walked around the house reflexively and uselessly turning on lights when we entered the room, and when it finally got too dark we went out to eat and to a movie.

Fortunately/unfortunately, there were only a dozen or so houses with no power. For the common benefit I know that's a good thing, but for us it meant that we were pretty low on the priority scale.

In the aftermath, you do what people always do in situations like this. We plan for the disaster that just happened. Even though I've looked into getting generators in the past, I decided we really don't lose power often enough and the consequences are not sufficiently dire to go to the trouble and expense. I'm still not interested in a generator, but I'm all psyched to go to Target and buy a couple of camping lanterns. Candles really don't make enough light and flashlights are a pain to hold for a long time.

Maybe I'll get a whole disaster preparedness kit. Bottled water? Hah! I'm going for the water purification kit. I got a whole pool full of water. Maybe I'll pick up some freeze dried rations while I'm at it. I've seen that stuff at REI. Dried meat loaf and ice cream and that kind of stuff. Looks yummy inside that silver vacuum pouch. First aid? I can be efficient and skip the rubbing alcohol and just get some extra vodka. You can disinfect with it, drink it, or use it for fuel.

The First College Visit and a Baseball Game

It's kind of early for this sort of thing, but as long as we were in Chicago we thought we'd visit a couple of colleges. Today we went to the University of Chicago. What a coincidence that it's here! (Like Eddie Izzard says about the Pilgrims, amazing that they left from Plymouth and landed in Plymouth). Pretty amazing place. Wish I'd gone there instead of where I actually went. The tour guide talked for 90 minutes straight and then the admissions woman talked for another hour. It's a terrific school and they have lots of words there.

We ate lunch at a bakery/cafe that's apparently a favorite of Barack Obama. Good stuff.

The game was at the snappily named U.S. Cellular Field. In the baseball stadium biz it's known as the place where the architects that designed most of the great new stadia (that's Latin for ya) made all their mistakes. No sh-t. It's completely characterless and you can't get in the place. If you take the subway to the game (which you should), to enter at ground level you have to walk all the way to the far end of the stadium. After an outcry, they retrofitted it with a raised pedestrian bridge, so you can get in close to the subway, but only from across the street. Very weird. The game was no snappier than the name, but I'm glad I got to see the place.

Ratio and Proportion

I was thinking as I was tooling around the lakefront on my Segway, that one of the problems with taking a trip like this is that the ratio of the time you take planning it and the time you're actually in the place is way too high. We're in Chicago for four full days, but I must have spent more than a dozen hours planning, or nearly a quarter of the time we're here. That seems like a less than optimal work:fun ratio. That's why spontaneity is nice. There's no work in that ratio.

BTAIM, this has been a pretty good trip considering it's 2 parents and an almost 17 year-old girl. On the first night we had an amazing dinner at a place called Moto. The restaurant is famous for its odd preparations and presentations. We had a 10 course tasting menu, which didn't include any of the dishes prepared with liquid nitrogen, but did include an edible piece of paper that tasted like Buffalo chicken wings with blue cheese dressing and celery, a liquified greek salad in a pipette, "road kill" duck with beet puree blood and yellow lines on the plate and black salt gravel, and "cracker jack," a peanut flavored ball with a liquid popcorn center. And it was all delicious.

We've seen Blue Man Group and Second City, all very funny, taken a boat ride and a Segway tour along the lake front, and walked through Millennium Park with its giant silver bean. We're still visiting a couple of colleges, going to a baseball game (unfortunately not a Wrigley Field, the Cubbies are out of town) and seeing some cool modern art and maybe a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It's been a pretty good trip so far.

Travel

Of course, air travel is always somewhat unpleasant, but Southwest does seem to go out of its way to make it less so. Their people tend to act more like people and less like automatons than the other airlines. This has the residual effct of making the people flying with them less tense and better-humored, which is good for everyone. Those of you who know me would probably say I'm a reasonably nice, mellow, tolerant person, but when I'm trying to deal with US Airways, something about it immediately turns me into an SOB. When people are rude to me I have no problem bring rude in return and I arrive at the airport ready for them to be rude to me. Not fun.

Before I forget I have to mention my new favorite warning label. On the plane they give you Cheez-its and peanuts. On the (incredibly teeny) bag of peanuts it says:

INGREDIENTS: Peanuts, salt.
ALLERGY WARNING: This product produced in a factory that processes peanuts and tree nuts.

I guess it would have been more disturbing if it wasn't produced in that kind of factory.

Chicago

Oh my God are there a lot of tourists here! Why? I like Chicago. Been here several times in circumstances ranging from major business conventions to getting off a train after a 12-hour delayed 48 hour trip from Montana and a few more normal occasions, and I've always enjoyed myself. But a tourist mecca? Maybe for people from Gary, Indiana, but international? Cosmopolitan? I never would have figured it.

But why not. It has the best architecture of any city in the United States and there isn't even a close second. In the downtown area, any time you look up there's a treat. Art Deco, Romantic, Modern and Post-Modern. Turn of the 20th century buildings paying homage to the great edifices of Europe and turn of the 21st century buildings paying homage to them in turn. On one corner there's a building with real flying buttresses 40 stories up and across the street a modern skyscraper with rectangular structures on the setback to give a respectful nod to it.

It has good pizza too. And lots of stuff to do and great restaurants and a big honkin' lake.

More details tomorrow.

Driving

Almost had our first real accident today. We cut a left turn too close, swerved to the right (correctly) to get away from the car, but hit the accelerator instead of the break and almost hit a pole. I think everyone does that once or twice when they're first learning, and there really isn't any way to teach someone not to do it. You just have to hope for the best and try to learn to control your panic. That's why insurance rates are what they are.

Some Things Just Don't Sound Right

I have a package of ground turkey in my refrigerator that says "All Natural." I think the turkeys would beg to differ.

Quotable

There are signs around my neighborhood for "The Mother of All Yard Sales." I wonder if the person who made those signs knows who coined that particular turn of phrase. Do you know?

It was Saddam Hussein. During the first Gulf War he called for his troops to prepare for the "mother of all battles." Of course it wasn't really, but Saddam now lives on in our vernacular.

Be Very Afraid

I am embarking on one of the most terrifying journeys one can imagine. I am teaching my daughter to drive.

Let me say from the get go that she is, for a new driver, very good. She's basically careful, sees the road well, brakes and accelerates reasonably smoothly, and takes instruction well for a teenager. However, this does nothing to advance a feeling of calm and well-being.

I have strong opinions about driving and I drive in a way that reflects a particular philosophy. I know this is shocking that I have a philosophy of driving, but there you go. I haven't had an accident in over 30 years so it's hard to convince me that I'm wrong. My driving is based on two facts:

1. The idea of driving is to get from one place to another without bumping into anything. A corollary is that stationary things are easier to avoid than moving things.
   
2. Driving is the single most dangerous thing you do in your life (I think taking a shower is a distant second)

A number of strategies flow from these two facts. Most are based on the idea that you are safest if you can avoid driving with another car within bumping distance. So you don't drive next to anyone, go traffic speed to avoid passing or being passed, drive in the left lane on a freeway, and never count on anyone else to do the right thing.

Following this philosophy, or any other basic driving instruction, is predicated on the ability to drive in a straight line and to execute left and right turns at approximately a right angle. And this is where the adventure begins.

First let's talk about the straight line thing. We all know that the shortest distance between 2 points is straight line and so we should try to drive this way. Road design. however, conspires to thwart this in two ways. First of all, roads by necessity have to avoid things like trees and houses and streams, so many roads have curves. Second, roads are not flat. They are built to "crown" in the center and slope down to the right. This is to encourage water to flow off the road. Gravity therefore continually pulls the car to the right and the driver has to continually guide the car back to the left. New drivers forget to do this periodically, and also have an understandable fear of cars in the adjacent lane, so if you're sitting on the right side of the car, it's best to stay alert. Or wear a blindfold.

Turning is also a challenge. Cars are hard to turn. They're big heavy things and you have to control a whole bunch of things at the same time. You have to turn the wheel enough that the car turns and then recover it before it continues to turn after. This is astonishingly hard for new drivers, and I think it always catches their parent/instructor by surprise.

So we made it through a week of this with only one dent in the car. You have to resign yourself to dents if you're going to allow a new driver to take control of your car. This is why I'm doing this and not my wife. I'm keeping it there as a reminder.

I'll post on this again after we've been on a highway.

Getting to the New Digs

I rode my bicycle from the old school to the new school. It's a bit hard finding an appropriate route, because there are two sections of the route that are designed to be impenetrable. You can't get from Remington Rd. to Wynnewood Rd. without going on main roads somewhere, and Haverford College has no entrance on it's eastern front, so you're stuck with going north or south of it.

Before I go into details, let me add the the obvious best way to get to the new school is by the 100 trolley, which has a station that exits directly to the campus.

From the school you go a couple of blocks up Old Lancaster, then left on Sycamore. Why not just take Highland? In a car it probably doesn't matter, but when you're biking, shortening the trip by a couple of hundred yards saves a minute. Follow Sycamore to Merion Rd. I know there are lots of somewhat famous homes on this section of Merion Rd. We actually looked at a house there where Will Smith was living right before he left for California. He and Jada were just hanging out when we were looking at it. He wasn't a huge star yet, Fresh Prince of Bel Air was just about to come on the air. OMG! That was a long time ago! 17 years I think.

Follow Merion Rd to Bowman Av. and turn left. Go past the elementary school. The road is pretty beat up because of water pipe work, but you can manage. Make a right on Wynnewood Rd. This section is a pain in the butt. It's busy and there's lots of driveways, which are always terrifying for a cyclist because you're never sure if the person pulling out is only looking out for cars. Also, since you're going straight at Lancaster you have to end up in the middle lane because the right lane is right turn only. Bicycles in the middle lane are generally frowned upon by motorists.

Once you cross Lancaster there's not as much traffic and even though it's still a 4 lane road, your main concern is what are technically referred to as depressed storm drains. These storm drains are not depressed enough to harm themselves, but they're pretty good at harming you if you ride a bike over them. Follow Wynnewood Rd. for about a mile and then turn right onto County Line Rd. From the vantage point of County line Rd., it is difficult to discern any difference between the two counties. I guess this is one of these places where your neighbor goes to a different school from you. County Line Rd. has not been repaved for a long time, with the overall effect of simulating a gravel road. You can't go 100 feet without hitting some kind of patch or hole in the pavement. But you do get to pass Carlinos and a "multi-color hair salon." Not sure what that means.

Make a left on Ardmore Avenue and head down to Haverford Avenue. Here's where Haverford College is in the way. Fortunately, Haverford Av., though busy, has a center lane for left turns only. Since there are pretty much no places to make left turns on this stretch, this means that cars can pass you easily. Once you're past the college, defy the temptation to make a right on College Av. and go to the next light, which is Buck Rd. I'm sure nobody really wants to see a buck on Buck Rd, but that's okay because you then make a left onto Old Railroad Av. and I don't think anyone wants to see an old train there either.

Follow Old Railroad until you reach the intersection with another incarnation of County Line Rd. If my trip was any indication, during this stretch you will encounter a short but drenching rain shower. At the intersection go soft right onto some little street that takes you over to Byrn Mawr Av. It's more direct to go on Haverford Av, but the intersection of Haverford and Bryn Mawr was cleverly designed such that it is impossible to make a left turn onto Bryn Mawr Avenue, which is where you need to go. So go up the little street and make a left onto Bryn Mawr and go through the light, past Wawa on the left, and then the school is on the right.

Coming back is essentially the same, only backwards. The Haverford Avenue section is 2 lanes in this direction and seems to always be more heavily trafficked than the other direction. This state of affairs seems counterintuitive to me. You'd think that everyone would eventually end up on the eastern side. The best part of this section is that it's downhill.

When you're riding, there's always a time and place where you wish you had a motor. On this trip, it's the ride up Sycamore from Merion Rd. to Old Lancaster. It's not steep, just long and steady.

The trip took me 26 minutes. I don't really know how far it is, but I'm guessing my average speed is around 12-13 mph, including stops, 15 mph when actually riding.

Know Your Consumer Products

Benefiber is a fiber supplement.
Benecol is margarine.
Beneful is dog food.