Up the Tubes (Caution: TMI alert!)

I went to an Ear Nose and Throat doctor today. I always wondered what a doctor would do if they only wanted to do ear and throat and no nose. Anyway, I have a problem in my throat so I went to this guy today.

It was a little disconcerting because they said I'd been there 6 years ago and I have absolutely no memory of it, even after he told me what I was there for. This time he was looking for what was causing my persistent cough. I'd already seen a fascinating video of my swallowing radioactive pudding and Lorna Doones, and that didn't show any problem with my swallowing. So we're following the tubes to see where the problem is.

I always figured it was ear nose and throat in that order because it's alphabetized, but even here, when I'd not mentioned any problems with anything but the cough, the doc first checked my ears, then my nose, and finally my throat. He checked my throat in 3 ways.

First was the standard stick your tongue out and say ahh. Then he takes a paper towel, has me stick out my tongue again, only this time he grabs it, pulls and tells me to talk and then to sing "Eee, eee, eee." Try to say that with your tongue stuck out. I made a bit of noise and then started coughing enough that I saw stars. Then, and here's the fun part, he pulls a long thin tube out of the drawer and I know I'm in trouble. Really the only question is what he's going to stick it into.

He asks me if I have one nostril that's easier to breathe through so now I know. He gives me a bunch of tissues in case my eyes water, tells me it'll feel like I have a mosquito up my nose and then sends what feels like a fairly large number of mosquitoes up my nose. He then makes me talk, sing, and sing in a falsetto. I do an terrific job of pitch matching, because I am an excellent singer, especially without a tube up my nose, but he says nothing.

After all that he says my voice box is irritated, but he's not sure why, so we get to start testing medications, plus I'm not allowed to eat for 3 hours before I go to bed. That's going to be hard.

So nothing's settled, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

IntroSpectortion

Of course everyone is abuzz about Arlen Spector's change of parties. One thing that struck me was what Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said about how this is dangerous because it potentially allows one party unfettered control. This is true in a narrow sense, but I'm presuming any thoughtful Republican understands that had their party not decided to take a position of absolute obstruction, this probably wouldn't have happened.

The Senate is normally a collegial place, and the mechanisms are there to encourage the parties to work together. There's a tool called the filibuster that the minority party can use to stop legislation that it feels is essential to stop by requiring 60 votes instead of the traditional majority. It's been around as long as I can remember, but since the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, the Republicans have made it a policy to threaten to filibuster virtually every piece of legislation.

This policy has only hardened since Obama's election, and now has extended to many presidential appointments as well. You just have to wonder what Spector, who is by nature a compromiser, would have done had the Republicans made a serious attempt to work with the majority instead of just trying to obstruct. I guess we'll never know.

Life Without Bookmarks

I had to replace the hard drive on my laptop and I haven't copied any bookmarks over to my new browser, nor have I bookmarked any pages in the month I've been using it. It's a little like having a phone with no speed dial. I'm pleased that I remember the addresses for all my important stuff, and who knows, maybe I'll stumble onto something new and interesting in the process. When the web was brand new, it really felt like a web, with the possibility of cruising off in any direction at any time, never quite knowing where it would lead. Now, I read few blogs and check the sports score, do a bit of banking and check Facebook. Not much else. I guess I'm seeking more randomness in my life.

Oh well, off to the Google home page, where my daughter has without my knowledge set my preferences to Morse Code. Who knows where I may land next.

The Week In Review

This week just flew by. Maybe it's the first week back from vacation thing, maybe my various dramas at home keep everything moving, maybe I can feel we're on the slippery slope toward the end of the year, or maybe time actually did pass more quickly and I'm the only one who noticed. I don't know.

It's been a strange school year. My wife says that I always say that and I reply that that's because it always is. New building, new head of school, lots more impending changes for next year.

I feel like I'm in the second volume of a trilogy, like Lord of the Rings, where everything is set in motion in the first book and concluded in the third book, while the second book exists for the purposes of plot advancement and development, to make the final installment as dramatic as possible. Nobody ever remembers the second book and The Empire Strikes Back, the second movie in the original Star Wars trilogy, is the only second installment anyone remembers. How many people even remember the name of the second Harry Potter book?

It feels like nothing's ending and nothing's beginning. I guess I'll stay tuned.

Back to school

I just finished the least break-like break I've ever had. Aside from a few ballgames, I can't think of anything I did the whole time that was a fun thing that I wanted to do. I have noticed in the couple of days back at school that I am fresher in the classroom than I was, though I've had a couple of moments when it felt like an out of body experience. I should mention to any other teachers reading this that, based on my recent observations, if you have an out of body experience while you're teaching, it's maybe not such a great idea to share that fact with the students. They seem to find it unsettling.

My favorite thing I heard about coming back requires your knowing that I have an extremely messy, paper-strewn desk. Over break I put all of the papers into 3 shopping bags, brought them home, and to the delight of my family, proceeded to sort them on the dining room table. Before I left the office I wiped by desk down with a paper towel (okay, 7 paper towels) and it was completely neat and clean. My office neighbor came in before I got there, looked at my desk, and asked if I'd resigned. We'll see how long that lasts. When I worked in business, at one point I got frustrated enough with the clutter that I bought a book called, "Winning the War With Your Desk." A guy who worked for me came in, saw the book, thought for a moment and said, "My money's on the desk." The best system I came up with was one where every six months I would clear everything off my desk, put it in a box and tape it shut. When six months had passed, if I hadn't opened the box, I would throw it away and start a new box.

Overall, though, I'm happy being back. Teaching is more fun for me than almost anything I did over break.

A New York Trip in Three Acts

My family has a charitable foundation. My father was a very successful guy who reached a point where he realized he had more money than he could ever possibly need and decided to devote a good portion of his life to giving much of it away in ways that really benefit society. One of the things we do (I'm on the board of the foundation) is endow an internship and travel program at Barnard College. My father went to Columbia and my sister went to Barnard, so there's the connection. The grants allow students to do paid internships with nonprofit organizations instead of doing work study jobs. There are both travel grants and local activity grants. Every year they have a dinner to honor these young women and so we can meet them and I'd never been before.

Act I - To New York
Unfortunately, the dinner is in Upper Manhattan at 6PM on a weeknight and I, unlike the rest of my family, do not live in what the traffic reports call "The Tri-state Area" (though nobody really calls it that or even thinks of it that way). So I make a 4PM train reservation, look at the school schedule that has me finished at 3:30PM, and hope for the best. The plan is to get everything I needed in the car, park the car right outside the building where I have my last class, let the class out early (Shh!) and dash down to the train station and just barely make the train, if everything goes perfectly. It didn't. For one thing, I left one of my bags in my office and had to drive my car the 150 feet from one building to the other so I could grab it and go, and then the ride to the train station didn't take a LOT longer than I'd hoped, but it definitely took longer, even though I (accidentally) ran a red light and almost hit a school bus. I was 10 minutes late, enough that I don't even bother to run in from the parking lot. I walk into the station to see when the next train is and the board shows that my train is still there. So NOW I'm running and get my tickets and on the train about 45 seconds before it left.

Act II- The Dinner

The restaurant where the dinner is held, Terrace in the Sky, is a pretty space on the top floor of an anonymous Columbia-owned apartment building with a 360 degree view of Manhattan. Columbia celebrates owning this gem by not including it on any one of the many campus directories that dot the campus. Fortunately, the first person I asked for directions (yes, us guys do that sometimes) knew exactly where it was. When I get there I realize I'm the only guy there without a jacket and tie, but I guess I'm old enough now that they don't force me to wear the size 46 blue blazer they keep in the coat room for the heathen to borrow. And of course the students could care less.

So I start chatting with these girls, mostly college seniors but some juniors too, and they are amazing. Maybe my perspective is warped because I was such an idiot when I was in college, as were most of my friends, but these girls are so smart and energetic and engaged in life that it really blew me away. I sat at a table next to a girl who had spent her summer working in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital (!), and with others who did stuff ranging from researching using stem cells to grow pacemakers to writing a thesis charting the history of labor unions in Senegal from French colonial days to independence to French/Senegalese interdependence. Oh, and the paper was in French. I also talked with a young woman who'd studied ethnography, specifically the societal ramifications of multiple family residences in Bangladesh. This was particularly jarring to me because I realized that I know absolutely nothing about Bangladesh, or the whole Indian subcontinent for that matter (well, at least I know it's called that) because who cares about a part of the world where a quarter of the world's population lives.

I'm guessing the rest of the girls were equally impressive, but there wasn't time to talk to them all. I also felt like I talked way too much, but I guess that's what happens when you're out of your comfort zone. Nobody seemed to mind.

Act III - Back Home

I decide to cab it to the train station, and my cabbie is great. Did you know there are TVs in the back of New York cabs? I really need to get out more. He was one of these cabbies who drives 60 miles an hour in the city and complains the whole time about how much of a rush people are always in.

As we approach Penn Station, we're flying down a side street and someone suddenly opens their car door and we almost knock it off its hinges, but the driver swerves in time. We start laughing and the cabbie says this happens to him all the time and that people are in too much of a hurry to bother looking. I mention that it's a completely different experience to have someone open a door if you're on a bicycle, and the cabbie agrees that that can be very scary and dangerous. About 10 seconds later, the cab stops outside the entrance to Penn Station, I open the door to get out and WHAM! a delivery guy on a bicycle smashes into the door and topples over like in a cartoon, Chinese food containers scattering everywhere. I close the door and the cabbie and I are laughing hysterically. I felt kind of bad for the guy, but really. I always check if I open a door on the street side, but you never expect anyone to be stupid enough to try to pass a taxicab that just stopped outside Penn Station on the curb side of the cab. What did he think was going to happen after the cab stopped? Fortunately, he wasn't badly hurt and rode away, muttering at me in Chinese.

I made the train with 5 minutes to spare and was home a couple of hours later. Routine all the way.

Obama's Popularity

I've been intrigued by the rock-solid stability of President Obama's approval ratings. There's a lot going on and all kinds of angry noises from the lunatic fringe, but I'd had a feeling that this wouldn't really affect anything, and I think I figured out why.

Looking at this from a consumer behavior perspective, the approval ratings show that the customers are satisfied with the product. Why is this? Simple. The product, President Obama, has turned out to be almost exactly what candidate Obama promised to be. Virtually everything he has done was spelled out in his position papers and speeches, and he has at least touched on many of what he said were his top priorities.

He has also turned out to be exactly the kind of president that you would have imagined he'd be if you watched him during debates and other public appearances. He's been unflappable, inclusive, humorous, family oriented, and has shown the intelligence and understanding of events and consequences that he displayed throughout his campaign.

None of this has anything to do with whether or not you agree with the man. I happen to like most of what he's done and abhor some of it as well. But I can't say I didn't get the product I (and everyone else) thought we were buying. This is the first rule of marketing. Deliver what you promise and don't promise what you can't deliver. Even if I don't think the cereal I eat in the morning is perfect, I am a satisfied customer because I got what I expected and what I paid for.

It'll be interesting to see how things develop, but I'm guessing that approval rating will be stable as long as the product is what it claims to be.

I Amuse Myself

Wouldn't it be funny if a doctor had the last name, "Appointment"?

Baseball Bummer

A lot of attention has quite rightly been focused on Harry Kalas, whose death will make Philadelphia baseball a bit poorer, just as his longtime sidekick Richie Ashburns's death did years back. But I grew up in New York and I guess I'm not affected the same as people who grew up with him (though I clearly remember his NFL Films work). So I want to spend a moment remembering Mark Fydrich, who died in some sort of truck accident at the age of 54 today.

Fydrich, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, was known as The Bird because he resembled Big Bird on Sesame Street. He was a tall, gangly guy who was, let's just say, extremely animated on the mound. He was most famous for talking to the baseball- nothing weird, just telling it where to go- and getting down on his hands and knees to groom the area around the pitching rubber. Just Google him and you'll see pictures. He was Rookie of the Year 1976 and he was beloved. He was just a friendly, uninhibited farm boy with curly hair and a great smile, and he was a terrific pitcher. Then he hurt his knee jumping over a fence, then hurt his arm and was never the same again.

I saw him pitch once in Yankee Stadium in 1979 when he was attempting a comeback. He was pitching against Ron Guidry, who was the best pitcher in baseball at that particular moment. I sat front row in the center field bleachers with binoculars so I could watch every pitch. Fydrich was as much fun as advertised, but he got hit hard and only lasted a few innings. Guidry struck out 17, tying the single game record for a lefthanded pitcher that I had, strangely enough, seen set in Anaheim 5 years earlier. It was exciting for everyone, but even the Yankee fans were sad that Fydrich hadn't done better. He was that popular and he was certainly one of a kind.

Dental Blogging

I had a visit to the dentist today. I have terrible teeth, a product of two parents with terrible teeth and growing up just before they figured the whole fluoride thing out. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say I've had well over 60 fillings, a dozen crowns and two partially fake teeth, plus I had a couple of teeth yanked out while I was not under a general anaesthetic. So I started seeing this particular dentist about 20 years ago and he pretty much reconstructed all my teeth. Since he did that I haven't really had any problems, aided by the fact that I have very little actual tooth surface remaining.

But today I went because something didn't feel right and he said I had a cracked filing that needed replacement. My dentist is a good guy and the work is nearly, or in today's case, completely painless.

Here's how being at the dentist that is different that the rest of my life: 

First and foremost, I rarely have other people's hands in my mouth. In fact, I rarely have anything other than food or beverage in my mouth. But at the dentist I spend a lot of time with two hands (or pieces of hands, anyway) and anywhere from 2 to 4 metal instruments, including a little vacuum cleaner in me. I once asked a dentist if they had funny nicknames for the instruments back when they were in dental school and he didn't find that at all amusing.

Aside from the hands in my mouth, between me and the spotlight, are two more hands and two heads, one of which is wearing a headset with magnifiers on both eyes and a flashlight in the middle of his forehead, like a very nearsighted miner.

Rather than me having to move, the dentist moves me wherever he wants to using the chair.

And my favorite thing, when he's working, my dentist uses me as a table. I understand that I'm horizontal and have a placemat on my chest, but shouldn't they at least ask permission before they start piling things on me?

But it's done for now. I'm still numb and sitting at one of my favorite places in Philadelphia, the Curtis Building lobby with the Tiffany "Dream Garden" mural until I have enough feeling to eat and drink something. Then it's on to a funeral...

Movie Night

Finally watched "Into The Wild." We've had it from Netflix for a couple of months, but it's 2 1/2 hours long so we never want to watch it. I'm presuming the book was more fascinating than the movie was. You have to have seen (or read, I suppose) it to understand what I mean, but I think the moral of the story is "Don't go food shopping when you're hungry."

Just Sayin'

Being right is highly overrated. Being absolutely positive you're right is usually a prelude to disaster.

Kosher for Passoveriness (updated)

I made Manischewitz Blueberry Muffin mix this morning and I have 3 things to say. First of all, they were quite edible, at least when they were right out of the oven. Second, I think we have a real spirit versus letter of the law thing happening when you have a mix that says to mix and then wait 10 minutes. I know that in this case it's just for the liquid to soak into the matzo meal, but it doesn't seem fitting with the whole "no time for bread to rise" thing. Finally, I want everyone who has this mix at home to find the word "blueberry" in the ingredients. It says on the label, "artificially flavored blueberry bits." So I was curious why they had to artificially flavor the blueberry bits, since they are blueberry muffins and the language is quite clear that there are, in fact, blueberry bits.

I'll give you a couple of minutes. The type is small and has a lot of long words in it.

Found it? Okay, on the 7th line starts an ingredient called (and note the sight difference in construction) blueberry flavored bits. Next comes a parentheses, which in label language means that all the substances listed in the parentheses make up the item before the parentheses, (ingredients of the ingredients, if you will, with the largest ingredients by law listed first). Here goes: Alginate, propylene glycol, potassium sorbate, natural and artificial flavoring, artificial color.

Anything missing? I had slight hopes that alginate came from blueberries and not from what it sounds like, but my suspicions were correct. According to Wikipedia, alginate is a viscous gum that is abundant in the cell walls of brown algae. I'm sure there was plenty of that stuff in the Sea of Reeds. I know for a fact that blueberries can be dried and put in muffins, so there's no excuse aside from trying to extract maximum profits out of a $4.49 box of muffin mix. Ugh.

Update
Just checked the Apple Cinnamon muffins and they contain something called apple flavored bits with no ingredients in parentheses. What exactly is a bit? I don't think Alpha Bits are Kp. Computer bits wouldn't be very filling, and the horse kind are tough to chew. It doesn't look very promising. I'm making my muffins from scratch next year.

Traffic Court

I went to Philadelphia Traffic Court today. As an aside, let me pat myself on the back and say that I am an exceptionally careful driver. I put more thought into how to drive safely than anyone I know and I haven't had an accident in 31 years. I had also not gotten a traffic ticket for 10 years (and that was for speeding on Lincoln Drive, perhaps the most laughable violation possible since the speed limit is 25 and NOBODY drives less than 15 miles an hour above that).

So when I was coming home from the Pretenders concert I misjudged a yellow light on West River Drive, entered the intersection just as the light turned red and got pulled over. I couldn't really argue with the ticket, but I really didn't want the dreaded "points" on my license. Honestly, I'm sure one violation in the past 10 years wasn't going to send my insurance rates skyrocketing, but my fear was that, careful as I am, I might screw up again (or get stopped for speeding on Lincoln Drive again) and then I'd be in trouble.

You can't have this kind of discussion with the police officer at the time. They're pretty much looking for politeness and submission and that's what I gave her. What you need to do is send in a "not guilty" plea and pay the fine and then go to traffic court. With the Lincoln drive thing, I'd spent the time between the ticket and the court date (about 6 weeks) documenting how fast people drove. Every day I drove 35 mph, 10 mph above the limit, and counted how many cars I passed and how many passed me (it was around 1 to 400). I went to court with my spreadsheet. Sat down, and the policeman came into court and called out that anyone who wanted to plead to a lower violation should come up.

I walked up. He said, "Speeding on Lincoln Drive, eh. Did you hit anyone?" I said, "No." He said, "Okay, I'll reduce it to 5 miles per hour over the limit and no points, okay?" I said okay, left and got a refund of $33 in the mail 2 months later.

Today, I was lucky enough to get a parking space on the street and walked over to the courthouse. It does not look like your mental picture of a courthouse. It looks like a place you go for a blood drive, or if you missed a FedEx delivery and have to go to the warehouse. Actually, the FedEx warehouse is across the street. I remembered where in the square block sized building the entrance is (hint, not on the street listed as the building's address). Walking down the street I realize I have never seen so much litter anywhere in my life. The sidewalk and the street were covered in garbage, and there's a fence around the building with a solid strip of garbage about 3 feet wide all along the inside of the fence. It was really striking. Sorry I didn't take a picture.

I go inside, through the metal detector, and down the hall to Courtroom E, conveniently located between Courtroom's D and F. It's FREEZING in the courtroom, but I figure that's good 'cause it means they want everyone out of there quick. I give my summons to the very pleasant clerk and sit on one of the pews (that's what they looked like anyway). There are about 25 other people in the room.

Trial was set for 1 PM, and at about 1:05 a guy pokes his head through a door and says, "ready?" The clerk say yes, and about 30 seconds later the same guy come in wearing a robe. This time we stand when he comes in and sit down when he does.

They proceed to call people in the order they checked in. The judge says, "How do you plead?" to the first woman. She says something inaudible and the judge says "This is traffic court, we're very agreeable here." I like this guy.

So one by one the people come up. Most plead not guilty, they tell their story and the judge finds them guilty of a a lesser violation and no points on their license and offers to set up a monthly payment plan. I like this guy. He's actually pretty funny.

The guy before me is a tall young man (I never saw his face). You're supposed to come up with your driver's license and the judge say, "This is a Colorado license, are you a student?" The guy says yes. The violation was that he was driving with snow completely covering his rear window and he pleads not guilty. The judge asks him to explain and he says he was driving home from coaching basketball in West Philly and when he came around a corner and all the snow slid off his roof and onto the rear window. Since he didn't feel safe trying to parallel park with the back window covered, he continued along the street and was stopped by the police 30 feet from home.

The judge says, "You're from Colorado. Don't you know how to deal with snow on your car?" And the guy says, "At home, I drive an SUV and the rear window is vertical, so this has never happened to me before." The judge cocks his head and says, "Okay, I'll buy that. Not guilty."

I felt so boring coming after that, but I say I wanted to please guilty to a no points violation and the judge says okay. He says the fine is still the same and I say that's alright, I misjudged the light. He says, I know, it happens to all of us. And that was it. Beginning to end, 27 minutes.

I highly recommend doing this any time you get a ticket. Every single person got something in return for their taking the time to come in, there really isn't anything unpleasant about it (except maybe for the neighborhood) and I actually found it kind of interesting.

Passover Riffing

I was writing someone and telling them that I was searching for Passover recipes online. About half of them are for roast chicken, and it occurred to me that if the COI had time to roast a chicken, they certainly would have had time to make bread. My guess is that they stir fried, but my wife suggested making a seder where all of the recipes were things you could make as you fled.

Of course, the whole manna thing suggests that the COI were not too fond of their culinary choices, but I'll give it a try anyway. So for an appetizer, soup takes too long and is very heavy, but they must have had the opportunity to snag some fish as they dashed through the Red Sea , so I'd suggest a smoked fish canape'. For a main course, I think a frittata (with Jerusalem artichokes?) would be nice, quick and good to eat on the run. On the side, I don't think there was Minute Rice or microwaves yet, but couscous with onions and mushrooms would be fine if you made it sticky enough to eat with your hands, which is the way mine usually turns out anyway. For a salad, they should take advantage of one of their last opportunities before Kashrut was invented and have a wilted spinach (doubt they had any other kind) salad with bacon bits. Dessert? Honey cake, chocolate covered matzoh and fake fruit slices, of course!

I wish everyone a happy, healthy Passover. Oh, and whoever wrote that 4 kinds of children section needs to read a parenting book or two.

Underrated Life Skill

Being able to get in and out of a car with an umbrella.

Best coupon ad this week

Free carpet stain remover if you buy the Marley and Me DVD.

Diplomatical

I raed that Obama interceded in a heated exchange between the president of France and the president of China. Whew! If he hadn't it might have turned into....I guess two old men yelling at each other in languages the other one couldn't understand,

It is an ex-hamster

I just laid our hamster to rest. Her name was Sarah Butterscotch because my daughter couldn't decide which of those two names she liked better 2 years ago. She was very cute, but had seemed increasingly sluggish this past week, and this afternoon she made what my daughter referred to as "a really weird noise" and by this evening she had expired.

She lead a typical hamster life- most of it in the cage with a week-long break to live one in my closet behind my pants when we were away on vacation plus 48 hours behind my daughter's bed. She was 2 years and 2 months old, which is equivalent to about 75 human years, making me about 19 months old in hamster years.

News you can use

Worth a click

We find these truths to be self-evident

A household with no 17 year-old girl in it is a lot mellower than a household that contains one.

Sporty

I've been fortunate to have attended several of the most famous sporting events of the last 50 years, the best ones being the Mets winning their first world championship in 1969, the Knicks winning the NBA championship in 1970 (the "Willis Reed game"), and the Yankees winning in 1977 (Reggie Jackson's 3 consecutive home runs). I also watched every minute of Villanova's 1985 championship game. So every time something amazing happens in sports I think about how it stands up.

To me it stands as the most exciting game I didn't see. I was driving to pick up my daughter at the airport for part of it and heard it on the radio. At the airport the TVs are permanently tuned to CNN so I saw none of it there. We listened to more of it on the way home, and saw the last 3 minutes in a jumble as soon as we came in the house because my kids were being annoying, But I did see that last shot...

BTW, if anyone's interested in the evolution of the media, in 1970 the NBA final wasn't important enough to be in prime time on one of the national networks (this was before cable), of which there were 3 at the time. So it was shown on tape delay at 11:30 PM after the local news. So I got to see it at Madison Square Garden, drive home, and then watch it, not live but first broadcast, on TV.

The Cleaner

I am not an orderly person. One of the my favorite lines is what Einstein said when someone commented on how messy his office was. "They should see what it looks like in here." he said, pointing to his head.

So speaking as a disorderly person (non-orderly? or "Speaking not as an orderly person..."?), I think I can opine authoritatively on what constitutes a mess. There are two complementary principles in play. A mess is when you have the too many different things in one place, and when you have one kind of thing in too many different places.

A good example of the former is my keyboard drawer. Among other things, it contains eye drops (3 bottles), flash drives (2) a battery, a glasses case with no glasses inside, a pack of gum, post-it notes, two bike lock keys, an earring (not mine), the keys to the biology lab in my former school building and to my ski rack, cards from supermarkets and other stores, including gift cards, frequent traveler programs, health care providers, health clubs, governmental entities and banks, a watch, two receipts, a DVD-R with figure skating recorded on it, a foil ball containning 3 ibuprofen, American and Canadian pennies, and of course, a keyboard, mouse and mouse pad. This variety makes it very hard to find anything aside from the biggest items, like the eyedrops, watch, and, of course, the keyboard.

One obvious example of the latter is trash. Trash belongs in the trash recepticle, and all kinds of problems ensue when trash is in places other than those recepticles, which it almost always is. The trick is, what is trash? Which leads me to my other example- keepsakes. If you have keepsakes in multiple locations, you are guaranteed to have a mess. One of the best pieces of cleaning advice I ever ignored was, "If you're saving something because it might come in handy someday, throw it out." Keepsakes are the emotional version of things that might come in handy someday. It's nice to have some, but too many can make it hard to find the things that actually are handy.

Facebook

I see there's a group called "We will not pay for Facebook." This is a perfectly reasonable statement with any easy solution- don't use Facebook and you'll never have to pay for it.

I spent a lot of years in the cable TV business and we used to get shrieks of horror every time we raised our rates, and I'd always think, well if you don't want to pay, then don't buy the service. Nobody's forcing you to watch TV. I don't like having to pay for potato chips and I especially hate it when they raise the price of potato chips. I think potato chips are the best food ever, but I don't need them, and nobody needs TV either.

I think a lot of people think they need Facebook, because it's the only way to stay connected to their friends. So then I guess the problem is that they don't want to pay for something they need, especially because it's been free. This resentment is particularly acute because the most avid users are adolescents who really aren't used to paying for things in general. No offence, kids, but tough noogies. Welcome to the real world. I don't like paying for gas and water and electricity, and at least water used to be free. But I feel like I need those things and so I pay. And telephone? The best comment on that was by Ernestine, the obnoxious telephone operator played by Lily Tomlin, who said, "If you don't like the phone company, try using 2 dixie cups and a string."

I've followed online business models from before the World Wide Web was invented way back in 1993, and Facebook, like many other online businesses that don't sell something, has been trying from day one to figure out how to make money. Many of those business no longer exist. Investors will pay for future profits for a while, especially when something gets huge really fast like this did, but in the long run, if nobody will pay for Facebook, it will disappear.

Yankee Online Stupidity

The New York Yankees made a big deal about how they started selling individual tickets today. Only one problem. The search engine is unusable. If you ask for "Best Available," you get the "legends" seats, which are only about $2,000 apiece. Try to search in cheaper sections or to get one of the "specials" they trumpet and you get "Sorry, no seats available. What a waste of time.

Passover or Practice makes Imperfect (Updated slightly)

Yesterday I went shopping for Kosher for Passover stuff. It seemed the perfect day because the supermarkets have their Passover aisles in order, everything's not all gone like it is during Passover itself, and on Saturday most observant Jews (which generally does not include me) wouldn't be shopping.

This all proved to be correct. What really struck me is the immense variety of foods that are now available. When I was a kid, it was matzo brei or eggs for breakfast, matzo and tuna for lunch, and roast something with potatoes for dinner. And that was about it. This year I find myself owning blueberry muffin mix, ravioli, pizza, chocolate covered ice cream pops and I forget what else. Today I was informed that one of the large conservative synagogues around here told their congregation that rice and legumes were now okay, bringing the Ashkenazi guidelines more in line with the more relaxed Sefardic rules, so now we can add peanut butter and risotto to the mix.

So here's what I'm thinking. Passover treads a fine line here between the spirit and letter of the laws. It's not a holiday built around suffering and deprivation per se, but I always felt the soul of the holiday was to feel a oneness with our ancestors who escaped from Egypt and endured serious hardships on their way to freedom. So then because the Children of Israel didn't have baking powder back in the day it's okay to make stuff that rises with baking powder? Even though one of the most famous passages from the story involves not having time to let their dough rise, giving birth to the wonder that is matzo? I guess baking powder rises faster than yeast, but really.

I have a good friend who, explaining why he was having a beer during passover, said, "I don't remember reading anything about the CoI (my new abbreviation) not having the time to brew beer." Well, that may be so, and though I'm perfectly happy to stick with wine for 8 days, I can't say I'm completely unmoved by this. But the bible doesn't say anthing about not watching television or driving SUVs on Shabbos either, but many people draw that inference from other laws.

I guess the problem is that the observance of Passover is a metaphor, and it's difficult to make strict metaphorical rules. Symbolism is by it's very nature an individual thing. A friend of mine once sent me this long joke about a conversation between a man writing the rules of kashrut and God (and I apologize if this is either familiar or told incorrectly- it's a metaphor). The man starts with the prohibition of boiling a calf in its mother's milk. He then goes on to derive all of the basic rules, from cloven hoof to shellfish, and stops to get God's assent as he goes through. For each rule, God says okay and the man eventually finishes. As he walks way from the shrine, God calls out to him and says, "Oh, and one more thing- make sure you don't boil a calf in its mother's milk."

I don't have any answers for this, but I do think the questions are interesting.

More bad language

Aside from bromance, the other word I'm seeing a lot is octomom. I really like that one. What's best about it is that if you didn't know the story you'd have no idea what it meant. We know octo is 8 (except October is the 10th month, but we'll leave that for another time), but 8 what? Feet? Teeth? Tongues? Stomachs? Antennae? It conjures up all kinds of science fiction visuals.

Did I miss something?

I like to think of myself as reasonably culturally literate, but when did "bromance" become a word that no longer needs explanation? It's not hard to figure out what it means, but I've seen it used so frequently and casually of late (mostly to describe the movie, I Love You, Man) that I was wondering if it's been around longer than I thought.

Etty Kit

Is it rude to let your dog pee on someone's lawn if they're standing there? I don't mean your dog peeing on them; I know that's rude. I mean just around where they can see. And how about poop? Even if you have a clean-up bag.

Checking in again

Sorry to be repetitive, but I've been sick for well over a month. I'm not really really sick. I've missed days of work here and there but I've pretty much been working for the last 3 weeks. But I've been anywhere from uncomfortable to in pain. It's put me in a bad mood and I haven't felt like doing anything.

So I'm going to try to reenter blogging life, but don't be surprised if there's a cranky tone to a lot of it.

Aside from the whole sick part...

In the animal kingdom, the weak and sick get weeded out and left behind to fend for themselves, because that's what's appropriate for the common good. The human equivalent of this is that if you stay sick long enough, no matter how much your family loves you, they will eventually get tired of your being sick and will become more concerned with the inconvenience that it causes them. Stay sick for over a month, like me, and you risk becoming a pariah.

Once that happens, you're stuck. If your inclination is to try to act like nothing's wrong, you feel awful and/or get sicker, but at least people are nice to you. Acting like you're still sick will help you feel better, but you won't be treated well. At this point, in my usual fashion, I'm balancing between the two- trying to keep up as much normalcy as possible, while getting the rest I need.

Time keeps on slipping

Whoever is in charge of such things around here thinks that switching to Daylight Savings Time means that you set your clocks ahead 56 minutes.

Hello Out There

Sorry I haven't written lately. I've been uncomfortably sick for over 3 weeks now and I'm just not finding much of anything funny or even interesting.

Classless

I'm aware that the ownership of the Philadelphia Inquirer is headed by a Republican activist, but it still angered me to see the headline as an immediate reaction to Obama's budget, "Worries About Class Warfare." Now I heard the same thing parroted on "Meet The Press." Who exactly is worried, and why is it only called class warfare when it favors the middle class versus the rich and not the other way around?

It's clear to anyone paying attention that the 8 years of the Bush administration have witnessed a vicious and sustained attack by the rich against everyone else, driving income disparity to levels unheard of in American history and beyond. It's one of the major reasons the vast majority of Americans thought the country was on the "wrong track" coming into the most recent election. So now, given a budget that returns the tax burden to the way it was 10 years ago, this is class warfare? It takes deeply warped thinking and a spectacular sense of entitlement to come up with that.

I'm hopeful that our collective sense of fairness will overcome this disingenuous line of thinking, but I guess we'll have to cross pur fingers and see how it all plays out.

Back at school

Felt good to be back at school today. A couple of random thoughts having nothing to do with that:

If you're curious why Hugh Jackman told Mickey Rourke they'd use a 20 minute delay instead of a 7 second delay if he won, check out his acceptance speech from the Independent Spirit Awards.

I don't think I take anything as seriously as U2 takes themselves. Accomplished as they are, listening to U2 and Coldplay consecutively is enough to suck all the fun out of music.

Amazing stories

My favorite news article of the week.

Back to the living

I'm actually out of the house at the moment, a rarity for me of late (setting aside the time we were away and I was just lying in a hotel room). It feels good, but very unsettling. So is the prospect of returning to school. I have a close emotional attachment to the place, and to have been separated from it for a week and a half, including 4 school days, is upsetting. Even when I broke my hand and had surgery, I was back in 2 days- not totally functional, but back nonetheless. This time, however, I had felt unwell for at least a week before I got really sick, so it's been two weeks since I've really been myself. And I'm still not. The coughing is not quite as severe and scary, but it's very much still there and I'm concerned it's going to frighten someone.

So I sit here on Saturday feeling almost like I do the day before school starts, expectant but a bit nervous. But the world is big and the sky is bright today and I'm looking forward to seeing Rennie Harris tonight and the Oscars tomorrow and being back in the classroom Monday. It's all of a piece. As the Tralfamadorians would tell me, it's just part of a continuum and my life goes on, so it goes. It would be nice if I'd learned something profound from this experience, but I haven't. Just remember to wash your hands and don't always try to keep pushing yourself when your body tells you not too. Nothing you're doing is so important that you can't miss it. I kind of knew that already, but this was a pretty powerful reminder.

Another sick day

I'm feeling just a bit better today, though it's still pretty bad. I am definitely getting tired of hearing everyone's story about how their friend/wife/kid has or had the same thing and how terrible it was. That's why you should never tell anyone you're sick. All they'll do is tell you about how it was when they were sick. Same reason you never try to tell someone about your vacation, unless you really want to hear all about their vacation to that same place or maybe just someplace your vacation reminded them of.

This illness is all about phlegm. That's okay. it's one of my favorite words, (I like fracas too), but I'll be glad when it's gone, which should be within a week or two, depending on whose story I choose to believe.

More sick

I had these great plans to document my time being sick, but I've come to the conclusion that being sick is not funny and it's not interesting, aside from in this particular case, moments of fright when my throat closes up and I can't breathe for a couple of seconds. I know it passes pretty quickly, but choking is choking and it's not fun at all.

Watching TV while sick

I can tell you this from watching about 2 hours of downhill skiing on TV with the sound off:

The guys who look like they're about to fall the whole way down don't do as well as thise who don't. But they do do better than the ones who actually fall.

Food Glorious Food

When you're thinking about the things you eat and drink, you should keep in mind that the stuff that makes orange soda look orange has absolutely nothing to do with the stuff that makes it taste orange.

Sick on vacation

I've been feeling sick for about a week and a half now, but never so bad that I absolutely needed to take time off and the school schedule was such that it was never convenient to take time off. So now here I am in a hotel, still feeling lousy. I manage to get up and conduct the day's activities- I really enjoyed skiing for instance- but I have bad cough and no energy and no appetite and by the time we're done with dinner I'm collapsed in bed, which is very much not like me.

So how do you conduct yourself in such a situation? This is one of the subtle kinds of choices that adults face on a daily basis. How much do I push myself, especially when I've always considered myself someone who can push through anything and has sometimes gotten himself into trouble as a result (a 2-day business trip with what turned out to be pneumonia was a particularly regrettable occasion).

So far, I'm choosing to split the difference, go as long as I can but eventually just giving in to it. This approach, however, favors my kids rather than my wife, who I'm sure would prefer to have me functional in the evening. Today we're not skiing, so I'll try something different. Like hoping I start to feel better.

Ski Lodge

Overheard in the locker area, a bunch of middle-aged people putting on ski boots:

"This is exhausting."
"I'm exhausted just from getting my kids ready and out."
"How old are your kids?"
"Young enough to need help and old enough to resent your helping them."
"They could be 25 then."

Okay, maybe I more participated than overheard...

Hotel vs. Condo

Sometimes we stay in a condo (especially if the kids bring friends) and sometimes we stay in a hotel. We're in the hotel this time, a lovely place called Mirror Lake Inn. Most of the time I'm more comfortable in a condo, because it's more like a house and a hotel room is just a small bedroom with a bunch of other stuff crammed into it. But the nice thing about being in the hotel is that you're taken care of. We arrived late last night and were exhausted, so we really appreciated the bellman carrying our luggage to the room. Today, the bathtub/shower wouldn't drain. One quick phone call, and maintenance guy, who looked remarkably like bellman, came up and fixed it immediately. It's just nice to have that support system when you're far from home.

Previously next

I'm not a consistent watcher of Lost. I saw a bunch of episodes from the first 3 seasons in a kind of discontinuous fashion, but now I see a few minutes at a time and hear it from a neighboring room sometimes. I think this is the best way to watch the show, as a bunch of scattered bits of action and a fun musical score. Why?

Well, at this point I've ceased to believe that there's an actual story. They started with a couple of plot lines and they've just let them go on and expand based on nothing more than "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" Then they make up the justification, such as it is, after the fact.

Second, the whole time travel thing brings new meaning to the TV catchphrase, "Previously on Lost.." So does that mean this stuff happened in the last episode or is it something that happened back in time? And what if it was something that was in the previous episode but happened in the future? Is that really previous? And I guess the same goes for "Next on Lost." What if that's something that happened in the past? Is that really next or is it previously?

Now my head hurts, which I guess really is the point of the show anyway.

About that last post...

What I forgot to mention is why is it that we need our car to tell us the temperature?

Yet more needless complexity

A friend of mine got a new car. It has the most amazing array of gadgets I've ever seen. There seem to be cameras all over it, so you can look at a console and, for example, not only see how far behind you an object is (rear-end cameras are so 2006), but if you park nose in in a parking lot, how close your front wheels are to the curb and even if you're centered in the parking space.

My friend likes all that stuff, but what she really wanted was to have a display on the dashboard of the outside temperature. A lot of cars have this and we were sure this car had it too, but there are, if I recall, 9 buttons on the steering wheel and 8 on the console, none of which will yield you the temperature. Here's where I was able to help- not because I have any temperature information seeking expertise, but because I'm not afraid to push buttons. I sense that a lot of people are afraid to just start pushing things, fearing that something will get messed up. I've worked with enough electronics to know that if you pay attention to what you push, there's almost always a way to backtrack and undo whatever damage you may have done.

My car, which is not as nice, has a button that says "Display," and it's not hard to figure out that that will control what's displayed. But here, behind the steering wheel on the dashboard, there are another two buttons, one of which just has kind of a dot on it, I decided to brave it (it's not my car, after all) and if you push that one 5 times you get a temperature display. Great that I could help, but ridiculous that it's hard.

Overdramatic

The are times when I wish I was the clueless sitcom dad.

More on the Concert

The Pretenders are in unusual band. They play pretty straight up rock with occasional ballads with no frills. The one thing that makes them unusual is their lead singer. I know there are some bands that have female lead singers and of course there are all female bands, but the Pretenders seem like any all guy rock band except the lead singer, songwriter, and for all intents and purposes the band itself is a woman, Chrissie Hynde. Those of you who don't follow music might know Chrissie as the singer that took Phoebe's place at the coffee shop briefly in Friends. Those of us who have followed her career enjoyed watching her struggling to learn "Smelly Cat."

For this concert the band had its original drummer, who was excellent, and an amazing lead guitarist named James Walbourne, but the Hynde is always the center of it all. She looks amazing for 58 years old (older than me!) and sounds great. She has also clearly lost none of that famously cranky personality that made her so endearing to some of us. She was clearly not happy with all the people taking flash pictures from the front of the audience and complained about it between every song for the first half hour. At one point someone called out that she wanted to take her picture and she said, "You want to take my picture? So we're all here so you can get your f---ing picture?" She walked to the front of the stage and posed, first giving the woman the finger, then with her back to her.

It was great stuff. The Pretenders were inducted into the R&R hall of fame in 2005 and it was well deserved.

Not a concert review

I saw The Pretenders last night. Great stuff. I can't go to a concert without a whirl of past concert experiences going through my head. Maybe it's because I've been to so many concerts but not so many lately. I saw pretty much every major band of the 60's 70's and 80's except for the Beatles and the Stones. Don't know why I never saw the Stones, but I never did. My first rock concert was the Credence Clearwater Revival, the great late 60's hit machine (if you've heard John Fogarty, he was the lead singer and wrote the songs). It was at Madison Square Garden and I went with my mom. I was 13 I think. My mom liked the concert okay but she preferred the opening band, a terrific group called Booker T and MGs.

I had a number of great concert experiences. They used to have summer concerts in Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park. It was subsidized by the city and tickets were $4 for the front section and $2 for the back section- all general admission. The only way to get tickets was to line up for a couple of hours at one of a half dozen places in the city that sold them- Ticketmaster didn't exist at the time. My place was the A&S department store in downtown Brooklyn. I'd go and buy as many as I could afford.

The best of these was Blondie and Rockpile. Blondie was of course one of the top bands of their day. Rockpile was a kind of new wave/rockabilly supergroup featuring Dave Edmunds, best known for his hit "Trouble Boys" and Nick Lowe, performer of "Pure Pop For Now People," one of the greatest new wave albums of the late 70's. Blondie's current hit was "One Way or Another" and we heard them sound check it a dozen times while we stood on line a dozen times to get in. It's still stuck in my head to this day. Blondie played a fantastic 2 hour show, but Rockpile, limited to the 45 minute allocation opening bands got, blew them off the stage, highlighted by a song called "Crawling From the Wreckage" which still maybe my favorite concert song ever.

A few years later, after I'd finished business school and moved back to New York, I learned about Ron Delsner's ticket club. Ron Delsner produced pretty much every major concert in the New York area in the 80's and if you paid him $100 it gave you the right to buy 2 or 4 tickets to every show he produced. They were usually the best seats in the venue and the only catch was that there weren't very many of them, so you had to go to his office on Wednesday, the day new tickets came in, and haggle with Ron's irritable sister, Harriet, to get tickets to as many shows as you could. We saw lots of great stuff though that club.

My favorite thing was the Concerts at the Pier. They didn't do the Wollman Rink concers anymore, but they had a similar general admission arrangement at one of the west side Manhattan piers. So how did the club give you the best seats in a general admission arrangement? We all got in at the same time, but the regular customers would enter through a gate on the north side of the pier, they would go almost the full length of the pier (about 100 yards), past the concessions stands, and then back toward the stage and seating which was all the way back on the street end of the south side of the pier. Club members would enter through a small gate on the south side next to the stage and walk right into the seating area. So we would walk in, pick our seats, sit down and then watch 1000+ people dash 100 yards out and 100 yards back and scramble for seats. This was really fun.

Enough for now. I'll write about the concert itself later.

SSB

Yesterday, one of my kids (1) injured her hand playing sports and (2) reported to me that "half of one of my teeth is missing." So here's my morning:

At 5:30 the phone rings to tell me that my school is canceled. I come downstairs and turn on my computer to see about my kids' schools. Neither school web site says boo, so I go to the KYW school closing site, which says nothing about either school, but reports that Philadelphia Public Schools are closed. I remember something from the school handbook at kid #1's school. I download the pdf and find that, yes, that school is closed. I then go back to kid #2's school site which has put a closing message up during those 3 minutes.

I go back to bed to wait for the phone calls from the other 2 schools. One comes after about 15 minutes and the other one, this from a school that sends messages to my home phone number and both me and my wife's cell phones every time a committee meeting is cancelled, never calls. I sleep until about 8:30.

Then I get up and call the doctor. They can take my kid whenever. I say 11, because I don't want to wake her too early. I then call the dentist. He has an opening at 11:15. Don't think that's enough time in between, so as I'm trying to decide if I want to call the other doctor back and reschedule, they tell me there's a spot at 1:30. Much better.

Wake kid #1 up at 10. She's grumpy. Kid #2 wakes up at 10:02. She's hungry. I make her some of my famous pancakes. I go to Starbucks and get coffee for everyone. Then home and to the doctor. First regular doctor, then down to x-ray. Sit and wait. Then x-rays taken and home to wait for the results. I say to kid #1, let's go to Trader Joe's before the dentist. She says okay. We get in the car and I get halfway and realize I don't have my wallet. This is not a positive development. We go back home and now there's no time for Trader Joes :(

Then to the dentist, get the tooth fixed. Come home. It's now 2PM. I have essentially done nothing and I'm exhausted.

So if your parents seem crabby today, give them a break, eh?

SAT Vocab Watch

Anybody else hear Al Michaels say that the Cardinals were moving with alacrity?

Secrets of the trade

I was dropping my dog off at the groomer and there was so much racket I started to wonder how people could even work there. Then a groomer came out and I saw them- ear plugs!

Do it yourself milk

At the Cosi in Bryn Mawr, they have only half & half and nonfat milk. So someone like me who likes regular (or even 2%) milk in their coffee has to act like a chemist.

The other mystery here is that there's a display case full of muffins but if you ask for one they go and take one out of the refrigerator and microwave it to bring it to room temperature. The net effect of this is to make a coffee and a muffin transaction into something complicated and time-consuming.

Ski Tripping

Just as an aside, I think lichens are interesting organisms- kind like a fungus that grows its own algae for nourishment. But they live on rocks, not in the Underworld, and I don't know why someone made a movie about them. It's got to be like the dullest thing ever, except of course compared to stupid CG action movies.

By virtue of my having done it the most years in a row, I am now the chaperone of record on school ski trips. I do not enjoy this at all. The paperwork is annoying at best and I'm always the last one who gets to ski as a result, especially this time when I left my boots on the bus and had to call the driver on his cell phone and wait for him to get back. But, someone has to do it and I've at least done it before.

Camelback is a nice place to do a trip. It's a little far, but there's a decent complement of trails over a broad difficulty level, and it's a good place for beginners. The skiing was kind of odd on Thursday. There had been a bunch of snow the previous day, topped off with a dollop of freezing rain. After grooming, this left you skiing on something that felt like a combination of of manmade snow and crushed ice, all stuck together. It's not as bad as it sounds. It was kind of bumpy in spots, but there was enough that you could set an edge and turn. It was also lightning fast.

Skiing in these medium sized resorts has a completely different feel than at larger places. At Camelback, I cant take the fast lift to the top in about 4-5 minutes (if that) and then ski down to the bottom in about 45 seconds and then just go right back up again. I didn't even get on the slope until 10:45 and by the time I stopped for lunch at 12 I'd done at least 10 runs.

I got to have a variety of interactions with students. I rode lifts and skied with them, watched one crash into a cyclone fence and almost get mowed down by another when I was going over to help her. While we were in the infirmary having the crasher's wrist put in a sling, this boy came in and reported that he'd knocked himself out. The first aid people were trying to work with him but he kept insisting that he'd knocked himself out several times before and he was fine. Boys can be so stupid. He was actually almost getting belligerent with the guys because they wanted him to lie down so they could examine him. Finally he calmed down a bit when they told him irritability was a common symptom of a concussion. Oh, and if you didn't know, concussions are cumulative. The second one is always worse than the first.

The ride back is always more eventful than the ride up where everyone's sleepy. We feed the kids on the way, so this year we got deli trays with a variety of sandwiches. The downside to this is that buses don't lend themselves well to food distribution, so if you can picture 60 kids gathered around the side of a bus taking sandwiches and pickles off deli trays that are sitting on the pavement in an adjacent parking space (and someone forget to order napkins), you kind of get the picture. We also had bags of baby carrots and the obligatory carrot fight. We dropped one kid off at a rest area to the care of someone who claimed to be his father. And we got back to school without having left anyone at the mountain and so I guess it all went fine. And am I up for it again? Sure I am. Next year I have to take pictures though.

Sorry I didn't get a picture

I saw a billboard on the way back from the ski trip. It was advertising a car dealer in the delightfully named town of Wind Gap. It featured a picture of a big hot dog and the caption was, "You never sausage a deal." Read it out loud if you don't get it.

Update: Here's a related link. Link? Sausage? Get it?

Also, there was an actual road sign that said, "No Services, Keep Right." I am not sure what the purpose of this sign is. If you want no services you should keep right? Does anybody seek that out?

More on the weather

I'm pretty torn here. We have 3 possibilities.

1. The storm turns into nothing and there's regular school hours tomorrow
2. School is canceled and midterms are delayed until Monday and the start of the second semester is delayed until Tuesday
3. School opening is delayed by 2 hours in which case one of the two midterms is given during the afternoon, the second semester starts as scheduled on Monday, except everyone with a math midterm has to take their midterm.

What I'm torn about is that I'm the only math teacher who isn't giving a midterm, so it doesn't affect me directly at all. So I'm not sure whether to root for 1 or 2, which will make it easiest on my colleagues, or option 3 which will provide maximum chaos. So being collegial versus entertaining myself. It's a tough choice.

Weather Update

I've gotten 6 e-mails in the last 24 hours about what to do if there's "inclement weather" on Wednesday. It seems pretty clear that there will be inclement weather on Wednesday. I want an e-mail or two about what we'll do if there's also inclement weather on Monday when we'll be trying to make up everything that gets rescheduled from Wednesday.

Post-inaugural blues

A friend of mine told me he was taking a sabbatical from political news. I'm starting to really see the wisdom of this. The amount of focus on Obama's first few days in office is beyond anything I've experienced. It reflects both the hopes everyone has pinned on Obama and the dreadful mess his predecessor left. There's so much damage to undo that everything takes on an added urgency. The hardest thing has to be deciding what emergency to tackle first.

And so if you follow the political news you're automatically drawn into the intensity of it all. Economy, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Hamas, stem cells, climate change, torture (however did we come to debating torture?) Guantanamo (oh yeah, another nice touch by the Republicans to not keep records on the prisoners), and we haven't even touched health care yet (what are you waiting for, it's been almost a week?). And I'm already burnt out. Most of the direction is good, but I think I need to take a break.

Sparkly boy

I have to admit it. I like figure skating. Ever since I had a crush on Peggy Fleming when I was a kid I've been hooked. The national championships were in Philadelphia a few years ago and my wife and I went to almost all of it. Saw Michelle Kwan win one of her 9 titles.

It's a funny sport. All of these judged sports are kind of odd- gymnastics, diving, synchronized swimming (and what exactly is singles synchronized swimming? Do you need an imaginary friend to compete?). Skating is very strenuous and the people who do it are really fit. However, they've taken a lot of the fun out of it with the new pseudo-objective scoring system.

Back in the day, half the fun (or frustration) was the intrigue. All the communist countries would give great marks to the Russian and East German skaters and dis the Americans. British and US judges likewise. France was predictably a swing vote. Eventually a bunch of them got caught colluding and they changed the system.

In Men's skating this year, Johnny Weir (from Coatesville, the Inquirer never fails to remind us), one of the two top skaters for the last 5 years and a world medalist, was very sick in December and skated very poorly because he was out of shape. I guess some interviewer referenced Michael Jordan winning the NBA Championship with the the flu, and Weir, who is always good for a quote, said "Well Michael Jordan had a team around him. I'm just a skinny sparkly boy all alone in the middle of the ice." As silly as that sounds, it struck me a poignant and authentic and I guess it kind of explains the appeal to me, these tiny people in a huge expanse of white, all alone, performing amazing athletic feats.

Hem and haw

Isn't the Internet wonderful? I just used that phrase, meaning to hesitate, in an e-mail and it struck me that I had no idea what it came from. So I looked it up and the original British version is "hum and haw." In the American, "hem' is short for the throat clearing "ahem," and "haw" refers to a overly proper and hesitant way of speaking (haughty?)

Ellen DeGeneres

made a math joke. Talking about the inaugural, she said "It was full of pomp and circumstance. I don't know what pomp is, but circumstance is the distance around a circle."

Too Confusing

I'm a sucker for Girl Scout Cookies. Beyond my liking the cookies themselves, I also admire young girls (and their parents, usually moms) who can spend a freezing Sunday at a little table outside a supermarket to raise money. So I pretty much never pass one of these tables by without buying at least one box. This year, however, I'm having trouble finding the kinds of cookies I want. Thin Mints are still Thin Mints, but the enigmatically named Trefoils are just called Shortbread, and Samoas are Caramel deLites.

I've done a bit of research (and believe me, you can find out plenty about GS cookies if you try), starting with what Trefoil means (it means a leaf divided into 3 parts, like a clover- the Girl Scout logo is a trefoil). I then found out that there are 2 bakeries making cookies this year, only one of which gets to use the Trefoil name. I also learned a lot about foil trees in the process. Same thing with Samoas. I have to admit I'm a bit relieved about the latter. I'd have been pretty bummed if Samoas disappeared due to some kind of political correctness.

Decision-making

Lot's of people struggle with decisions. I know I've written about the consequences of having 80 different kinds of bread to choose from. Here's my favorite decision-making tool: Assume you're going to make the wrong decision.

If you're really not sure what to decide, the chances of making the correct decision can be estimated at around 50-50. So what I do is think about the consequences of choosing wrong. If you can't choose between the desired outcomes, how about the undesired ones? Which mistake would you rather make?

I learned this in business school, but the jury system (innocent until proven guilty) is founded on this principle. We'd rather let a guilty person go free than jail an innocent one.

This isn't going to help with bread choices, but when you have a sticky moral dilemma, it can come in handy.

Random Thoughts

I still haven't completely come down from the joy of the inauguation. And I hope I don't anytime soon.

On the other hand, the Forbes Magazine list of the 25 Most Influential Liberals in the Media is pretty light on actual liberals. As much as I like Daily Kos, I think the most interesting liberal blogs to read are Talking Points Memo and Matt Yglesias. I actually don't read all that many blogs and have no particular interest in expanding my list. You can waste multiple lifetimes on this kind of stuff.

I can't believe the first semester of school is over (for me at least, the actual students have midterms). It has absolutely flown by.

My daughter has been using my car every day, so I've been relying on a combination of bike/Septa and friends from work to get me to and from work. I'd feel like I was really inconveniencing people if I continued to do this after I got my car back, but it's nice being driven. I get picked up in the morning and the car is already warm, and then I'm dropped at my door after work. It makes the commute seem shorter and I always ride with people who have nice cars. The bike rides to the station have been pretty frigid, but I could see doing it regularly when the weather's warmer. Plus I get to ride the shuttle bus with the kids, and I like having a chance to talk to students when it's not about math homework.

Today we found out that out dog is limping because she's 8 pounds overweight. This may not seem like much, but it is for something that only weighs 32 pounds to start with, so we have to cut her food by 1/3. This should be fun. Nothing like a hungry dog to stir things up.

As opposed to an impossible bird?

Possible bird found in airliner engine

Headline on MSNBC.com

Beyonce

I have come to the conclusion that Beyonce is not a real person but a sort of cyborg who shifts from one beautiful form to another.

Historic Day

My first strong politics-related memory was JFK being assassinated. I was 8. I remember going to see President Johnson in a motorcade that went by out house in 1964 when he was running against Barry Goldwater. I worked as a copy boy at an international radio broadcast center in 1968 after all the atrocities of the summer and sat stunned as Nixon beat Humphrey. I went to Plains, Georgia and met Jimmy Carter's mother while he was still running in the primaries in 1976. Since then I've mostly kept my head down. Reagan's trickle-down faux-populism, Bush's mediocrity, Clinton's infuriating talent and lack of focus, the 8 immensely destructive years of W. I roll it all up into this one amazing day, when I finally get to see the right person become president.

I am daunted by the world Obama's inherited. I think we are only beginning to see the reality of what these past few years inflicted on us. It will probably get worse before it gets better. But we now have a president with calm, intelligence, vision, and with the desire and ability to bring people together. Almost 60% of McCain voters are optimistic about Obama, and I'm guessing McCain himself is among them. I've never seen a defeated candidate handled with the grace that Obama's shown. Nothing even close.

So is it any wonder that I can't pin down my emotions today? I've had a political lifetime bookended by disasters. The one thing I'm resentful for is that the campaign appropriated the word "hope," because that's exactly what I'm feeling right now.

Can't believe I even need to say this

Since it's been so cold here the last few days, you can't go too long without someone saying, "Well, so much for global warming." This is so stupid it defies understanding. It's not called "northeastern United States warming." If it's especially cold here, that only means it's especially warm somewhere else. It could be somewhere in the Southern hemisphere, or it could be in San Diego (averaging about 12 degrees above normal temperatures for the last 10 days).

The Football Post

I'm watching 3rd Rock From The Sun (best sitcom ever!) where they're talking about football. The first line is, "Football? I thought that got canceled in January."

I'm not a big football fan. Never have been. I'm a sports fan, so I don't go out of my way to avoid it, but I'm not as engaged in it as most. However, I've been watching football since the 1960's (it's the sports that's on TV on Sunday) and have seen many many games including every Super Bowl, so I have a bit of perspective on the Eagles.

What the Eagles have done these past few years is unusual but hardly unprecedented. The Buffalo Bills went to the Super Bowl 4 times and never won. The Eagles are a very good team, but not a great team, and very good teams need a lot of breaks to win the Super Bowl. Andy Reid is a very good coach and evaluator of talent, but he's not great at either.

For all the overanalysis, McNabb is a very good quarterback, but not a great quarterback. He has never had quite the consistency needed to put together enough of a run to win it all. Yesterday's game was a microcosm. He made some amazing, perfect passes, and when the game was on the line he didn't throw badly, but he didn't throw great either. And he seems to be able to think only 90% clearly when the heat is on, so he makes mistakes sometimes. This doesn't make him bad. It just means he isn't great.

Have they lost more than their share of big games? Sure they have. They're not quite good enough to win even if they don't get the breaks. They suffered from some questionable officiating at key times yesterday, but great teams can overcome that, and this just isn't a great team.

So I'm sorry, but not surprised that they lost. That Fitzgerald guy is amazing and the Jackson catch is something I'll always remember. It was an entertaining game to watch. Only 25 days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

MLK Day

Listening to interviews and such today, I'm kind of unsettled to think that all this stuff happened during my lifetime. I lived for 10 years in a country where some people were simply not allowed to vote. It seems like it ought to have been longer ago than that. But clearly progress moves in a slow crawl and in great leaps and I feel lucky that I've seen all of it. I will not ever forget standing outside a barbed wire fence around the motel in Memphis where Dr. King was killed. It's a museum now, but it was just an out of business motel with no markings then (this was around 1987 or 88). You could see the motel balcony and where the shot came from. Chilling.

Maybe it bears repeating

I haven't covered this territory in a while, so as a quick overview for new readers, this blog operates on a the following philosophy:

1. Treat others the way you'd like to be treated.

2. Leave every situation you encounter better than you found it.

3. Pay attention. Don't do so many things at once that you lose focus on what's going on right in front of you. And as a corollary, LISTEN.

4. Have fun, but never at anyone's expense. If you insult someone and then say, "just kidding," you still insulted them.

Now whether or not the blogger, as opposed to the blog, lives up to this isn't really for me to decide. All I can do is try.

Go Eagles!

What's Cooking?

I heard someone on the radio today promoting her cookbook, The Axis Of Evil Cookbook. Looking at Amazon, there are actually two Axis-themed cookbooks listed. Go figure. There's good food to be found everywhere I guess, but I thought a large portion of the North Korean populace was severely undernourished.

I almost got hit by a nostalgic driver

Nostalgic as in, "Ah, I remember when that light was green and I want to re-live those times, even though the light is red now."

What is this?

Adidas
Acer Aspire
Aphrodite
audio books
apple iphone
Atlas Shrugged
airsoft guns
alarm clock
apple
animal collective

Treading carefully

I don't like to dip into politics here, especially Middle East politics, about which I am more ignorant that most of my colleagues (and students). All I want to say about it is that I think it's a grave error to attribute an enemy's actions simply to their being "evil." as opposed to understanding their motivations. I know there actually are evil people out there, but hate and greed are historically much more common motivators for wars than pure evil.

All Songs Considered

If you like a variety of music and are interested in hearing an eclectic, intelligent mix, check out the All Songs Considered podcast. I've been listening to a show called "The 1980's. Were they really that bad?" (Panel consensus is a definite yes). It's from 9/2/08 and it's a really interesting panel discussion deconstructing why the music's so bad. I'm up to the part where they're discussing bright spots, but even that is sometimes cringeworthy because the engineer keeps fooling around and doing things like playing "Hungry Like The Wolf" when a panelist asked for "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman (other high points were Replacements, REM, Guns and Roses and Talking Heads).

My Ferris Beuller moment

No, I didn't skip school or anything. More like the end when he's racing to beat his parents home. I don't have my car these days because my daughter's using it to get to her internship, which is inaccessible by public transit. So I'm getting rides from co-workers most days. This requires my being on a schedule.

Today I was getting picked up at 8:15. I was also dropping my other daughter off at school first. So I told my older one that I'd get her Starbucks on the way back if I had time (she was also leaving around 8:15). I zip back and forth to school and get back around here at 8:05, so I figure I'll go to Starbucks and if there's no line I'll get her coffee and if there's a line I won't. There's no line so I order some foamy coffee thing and go wait. Nothing comes, so I ask and it turns out they messed up my order. So they had to remake the coffee and now I was late.

So I head home and as I approach my road I see my ride 2 cars ahead of me. There's a light at my corner that I can see she isn't going to make so I make a quick left the block before, zip around the corner, pull into my carport, dash in the back door, hand off the coffee, thank you very much, and calmly walk out the front door, just as my ride pulls up.

Of course, it wouldn't have mattered if I was a minute or two late, but it still felt like I got away with something.

The Hall of Fame Gets it Right (mostly)

The most frequently heard line from HOF voters to defend their not voting someone is is "It's not the Hall of the Very Good." It's a fair statement, and you can't justify putting more marginal layers in just because there are already a few. But today's inductees were well chosen, even if there were a couple more who ought to have gotten in.

There's nobody in baseball today to compare to Rickey Henderson. Somebody once asked Bill James, probably the best known statistical analyst of the game, whether Henderson was a Hall of Famer, and he replied that Henderson was so good you could cut him in half and have 2 hall of famers. He was the most dominant offensive player of the 1980s and early 1990s and man oh man was he fun to watch.
Here are some of his statistics from 1985 with the Yankees: 146 runs in 143 games, 28 doubles, 5 triples, 24 homers, 72 RBIs, 99 walks, 80 stolen bases (caught 10 times) .419 OBP and .516 SLG. He's baseball's all time leader in runs scored and stolen bases (he stole 130 bases one year) and is second all time in bases on balls. He's the best leadoff hitter ever. Nobody else is close.

Jim Rice was never just thought of as very good. He was feared as a hitter and he hit the ball as hard as anyone I've ever seen. Amazing power. He wasn't one of my favorites like Rickey, but I always respected what he could do.

Facebook

I have a page. I don't want to be intrusive with students and former students, so I'll respond to being friended, but I won't initiate anything and I won't be insulted if people don't want to. It's just a way to keep in touch, since the blog is pretty much a one way thing.

Eagles Effect

I went skiing this morning. It was pretty crowded there until around 12 and then everybody vanished, at least all the people wearing jerseys over their coats and chanting on the lift lines. We got home about 3:00 and finished the game on Tivo about the same time the actual game ended. Pretty cool. Time to call my friend in Phoenix.

OverSATurated

Is it just me, or does the entire SAT process suck? And by the way, why is okay to use the word suck and not its rhyme that starts with a ph? Their meanings seem awfully similar to me.

Anyway, I have a daughter in high school who is freaking out about the SATs. Why is my kid mad at me because I didn't force her to start studying for a test 6 months ago? Is it normal for people to take that test 4 times? I don't get it. At this point all it does is test your ability to take a really long test.

I was talking to the guy who runs the local SAT prep place and I asked how business was. He said he'd seen no dropoff at all. We agreed that since his business was dependent on the insanity of baby boomer parents that he'd probably be able to weather any kind of economic storm.

Metablogging

I've tried to enable comments but I can't tell if it works. Can somebody let me know if you can find a place to comment? You may need to log in first- I'm not allowing anonymous comments and I'm moderating the comments as well. I'll try this for as long as it doesn't feel bad, so hold off on the evaluations of me as a person or a professional.

New Adventures

Before we get to my own adventures, I should mention that my reading glasses had an interesting couple of days. Reading glasses are the bane of my existence. If I had to choose between hair loss and needing reading glasses for the worst thing about getting older, I'd go with reading glasses in a second. I don't like that I've lost a lot of my hair, but it doesn't really affect my life in any way. Not being able to read stuff without taking something out of my pocket is a constant frustration.

So I had my reading glasses resting on the top of my head as I finish using the toilet. I lean over to flush and just as the water starts to move my glasses jump off my head and right into the bowl. Now, I've changed diapers so I'm not afraid of getting anything on my hands, but before I could get my hand down there, they were gone. So now I have no reading glasses and a clogged toilet (the only one downstairs) to boot. The plumber tells me they'll have to remove the whole toilet to get the out and it'll take all day, etc. etc. So the next day the guy comes, reaches in with something (I don't know what, I reached my hand in as far as I could and didn't feel them) and says, "Here they are."

So now I have these glasses that have been living in the toilet and what do I do with them? I'm afraid they'll melt if I run them through the dishwasher, so I put them in a bath of Purell. And now I'm wearing them again.

My own adventure is really less an adventure than an inconvenience. My daughter got her drivers license and is doing a month-long internship about 30 minutes from home, inaccessible by public transit. So she's driving my car. I used to work walking distance from home, but not any more, leaving me with finding other ways to get to work. Yesterday I rode my bike to the train (Brrrr!). Today I got a ride from a colleague. This fits nicely with my love of trip planning, only without the vacation at the end. But I grew up using public transit and I've never liked being so car-dependent, so this is okay as long as I don't feel like I'm imposing on anyone.

I know, I know. I can solve the whole thing by just getting her a car. Well if anyone has a few thousand dollars lying around, let me know and I'll put them to good use. Otherwise, we'll wait for a bit.

Random Thoughts

I got a text message from my daughter today accusing me of spiking her coffee with decaf. I swore I never touch the stuff.

We got a new stovetop cappuccino maker. It comes with an instructional DVD. In general, I think it's a good idea to avoid anything that needs an instructional DVD. Even our new Toaster Oven Broiler didn't have a DVD and it seems much more complicated that this thing, (the TOB is excellent, btw).

Regarding the TOB, there was something in Consumer Reports on the risks people take that they shouldn't and one of them was not unplugging the toaster when you're not using it. Does anyone do this? I guess anything is safer unplugged. But I don't turn off the gas when I'm done with the stove either. It's exciting to think I'm a risk-taker.

Today's Deep Thought

Anyone who tells you they give 110% is lying.

Movie Notes

Just got back from seeing Milk, which was excellent. I'm a little curious, though, about what kind of person would go to a film about the first openly gay elected official in the US and then say, out loud, "That's disgusting!" every time two men kissed each other. This was a woman sitting directly behind me. I mean, what movie did she thing she was coming to see? Maybe that cute little kid's movie that was advertised on the marquee, The Curious Ben Button. Cute little Ben. Always so curious.

Mystery

We stayed one night at a hotel in Montreal. The bathroom had 2 toilet paper rolls with 2 distinctly different kinds of toilet paper on them. I never got a chance to ask why.