Running On

Where I start: Out of Savannah, GA, past Pooler Georgia, on State Road 80, somewhere in Eden, GA - or West Pooler, GA. Maybe.
Where I end up: Hell, I don't know. I think I'm on the way to Brooklet, Georgia. I'm on a place called Ivanhoe Junction Road along State Road 80 in Georgia.
Total distance on map: 21.01 miles
Spare miles for next run: -0.05 miles

One of the problem I've had is that the Daft Logic Distance Calculator at this link has forgotten my ending point. So I've had to reconstruct part of my route from scratch - the starting location is very non-specific; imagine trying to find it on a Georgia map.

In any case - we're a far way from civilization now. Still running, but tonight in Atlanta it is very cold. Can't imagine how much colder it would be in Rural Georgia.

Two Cats Plus One

This morning, Ruth sighted Lexi the cat, the missing cat out of the three cats. While Ruth was downstairs, she looked up and saw Lexi on the stairwell. Lexi said "meow" as a greeting, but when Malcolm noticed her he went upstairs as to say hello.

Lexi disappeared again. But at least, she's alive and that's the important thing. We'll continue to leave up food out for her.

Schroedinger's Cat

Currently, we are cat-sitting for our friends during Thanksgiving day. They brought three cats for us to watch: Nickel, Bella and Lexi.

Nickel is easy to watch. Nickel is simply too big and too tough to give a damn. If he senses that our two cats are being too aggressive, he'll hiss at them. He hops on the desk and expects to be petted while I'm typing. He's basically a bigger, slower and less enthusiastic version of our kitten Malcolm.

Bella hasn't been seen much. She learned how to hide up in the ceiling - JOY. However, she does come down to steal food, and occasionally to run around in the basement. She's eating the dry food and using her litter box, so we know she's not starving. However, she refuses to socialize with the other cats and barely socializes with me.

Lexi has not been seen. AT ALL. Ruth believes that Lexi might have been in her room at sometime last night, but it was 3 am and she didn't see anything specific - it might have been Bella, and Ruth's night vision is not too good. If Lexi is hiding in the ceiling I've never seen her.

Is Lexi here at all? Where the hell is she? I'm worried, but then again, it's been a long time since I've owned a cat.

Sartorial Elegance, Part II

Today, November 21, 2010 was the very first day that I wore a bow-tie. I wore it to a basketball game.

I skipped right over the clip-on stage and into the true, honest-to-goodness adult bow-tie stage. It took me about an hour to figure it out, but I managed it.

Up next: high hats and narrow collars, white spats and lots of dollars.

Sartorial Elegance

The title is misleading, as I don't wear anything tailored. However, I do the next best thing. I wear a pink polo shirt.

Really. I've had two people comment about my shirt. One person was a co-worker, and the other person was a women's college basketball coach.

They might joke - but they recognize the shirt. Be a rebel. Put on the pink.

Running Through Eden

Where I start: Intersection of State Road 80 (East Victory Drive) and Harry S. Truman Parkway, Savannah, GA
Where I end up:Out of Savannah, GA, past Pooler Georgia, on State Road 80, somewhere in Eden, GA - or West Pooler, GA. Maybe.
Total distance on map: 24.5 miles
Spare miles for next run: +0.14 miles

It's been busy at work and women's basketball season has started again, so little time to write. I figure that I ran two times during my visit to Hialeah, four times on the cruise and once back home in Atlanta. (I forgot my workout clothes today). So I added up the distance and updated the map.

That took me out of Savannah, Georgia and somewhere near Eden, Georgia. I can tell you absolutely nothing about Eden, Georgia. Some people claim that it doesn't exist, and if it were found, it would be guarded by an angel with a flaming sword.

Cruise Control

Wednesday, November 10

Right now, my laptop is resting on a footstool and I’m looking out the window at sunny Belize. Obstructing my view of Belize is a giant cruise ship called Norwegian Spirit, but that’s quite all right. Neither my wife nor I got off the boat in Belize.

There are many reasons why we didn’t get off the boat, so I’ll settle on the most interesting one. Apparently, the coast of Belize is home to the second largest coral reef in the world, next to the Great Barrier Reef. Therefore, there are no large docks built that would be suitable for a cruise ship. As a result, anyone wanting off the boat has to take a tender – a craft with a maximum occupancy of about 100 people. Which is great, except this vessel has 2500 passengers.

This would leave us at the mercy of tender service, and one of my rules was to try not to be too dependent on someone else’s transportation. Combine that with the fact that there wasn’t anything we wanted to see in Belize, and that was enough to keep us on board.

I’m going to tell the story of what we’ve been doing since our departure on Friday, but by this time I barely see the point. I had started a blog that served as a personal diary a long time ago, but it fell into disuse. This previous blog can still be found on line by the intrepid searcher, but I don’t even read it. I have various starts and stops of diaries started here and there but all of them were quit at some point and I suspect that this one shall be, too. However, for those of you still reading, I’ll make another go of it.

On Friday, my wife and I made it down to Florida to the Hialeah-Miami Lakes area in anticipation for the wedding of the daughter of a good friend of my wife’s. Returning to south Florida reminded me of the horrible “signage” as my wife calls it – road signs are labeled in misleading and confusing ways. Add to this the fact that drivers from south Florida are truly, truly horrible – we saw several crimes against common traffic courtesy. The turn signal is an afterthought in south Florida.

Part of the problem – so I understand it – is that in south Florida there is no state agency that verifies driving proficiency. If you attend a certified traffic school and can pass their test, you shall be licensed. This is merely one example of turning a government function over to the free market in the mistaken belief that laissez-faire capitalism can do things automatically better, that one merely has to say “free market!” and magic happens like the sorcerer waving his wand. Since a traffic school doesn’t want to get the reputation of being a place that is tough on students, this has resulted in market pressure to pass every student. And trust me, some of these drivers deserve to be failed, multiple times over.

Because drivers are so bad, there were a lot of divided roads – roads with an artificial raised concrete barrier between their northbound and southbound lanes. These partitions had few gaps – if one wanted to turn into a driveway on the other side of the street, one had to drive to the end of the block, turn left (or pray there was a left turn signal), and then drive down in the opposite direction to reach one’s final destination. The alternative would have been letting people cross across two lanes of opposite-going traffic at will, and trust me – there were some drivers that would have been stupid enough to dart across traffic and narrowly avoiding collision.

We managed to reach the local La Quinta Inn, which is part of a national franchise of low-cost motor inns in the United States. The particular inn at which we stayed was the #2 La Quinta Inn in the U. S. and was very desirous of being the #1 Inn. It’s the only motel I’ve ever stayed at where they gave you candy. It was clean, efficient, and we were well treated there.

One of the terrors of long-distance travel is the fear that you might forget something. In this case, my wife forgot some critical medication. Part of the problem was that she had recently ordered a refill from the health plan of her previous employer, but she did not bring the refill bottle – instead, she brought the bottle that only had two pills in it. Therefore, we had to make several trips to the local pharmacist to get things sorted out.

In every place we went – pharmacy, hotel, gas station – we discovered that the service workers were all bilingual, being either the children of Cuban (legal) immigrants or Mexican (illegal) immigrants. Out of all of the arguments advocated against immigration a common one is that the new immigrants don’t speak English and tend to self-segregate. (In Atlanta, some right-wing city commissioner proposed that the signs of the restaurants on Buford Highway should be English-only – until his opponents pointed out to him that even if the signs were English only, his kind of voters would never patronize those restaurants anyway.)

But in Hialeah, I saw a flip side to the argument – if immigrants learn to speak very good English, then they’re going to be the ones getting all of the service jobs because they can speak two languages – putting ‘Mericans out of work, of course. (“THEY TOOK OUUUUR JOBBBBSSS!!”)

We spent time over the interim with my wife’s cousin and her husband who live in an apartment in Miami Lakes. He works as a funeral director and my understanding is that she works in a bank but is about to retire. (For a long time, they were unmarried until she got cancer and they realized that if anything serious happened to either of them, it might make sense to be covered on each other’s health plans.) Ruth states that her cousin has a hoarding problem. I don’t think she deserves to be on America’s greatest hoarders – not yet – but looking at her collections of DVDs and her collection of bottled soda, I think there might be some truth to those accusations.

Thursday, November 11

Right now, we’re off the coast of Costa Maya, Mexico. The seashore looks a little more desolate, but I suspect this is due to being docked on the opposite side of Costa Maya’s port.

Anyway, that Friday night Ruth’s cousin took us out to eat at an Italian restaurant. Nice enough, except that we were seated front and center during what must have been their live performance night, where a man in a pork pie hat belted out Frank and Dino’s greatest hits. It made it very hard to have a conversation.

That Saturday, Ruth and I took our first big trip of the vacation – we drove all the way from Miami Lakes to Key Largo, Florida for M.’s wedding. M. and her betrothed, E., had spent some time in Atlanta and M. vetted our clothing. I was wearing something Cuban men wear called a “wyabeta” shirt (I have no internet here to check spelling) and a pair of tan slacks. This wouldn’t have been appropriate for most weddings, but this was going to be a beach wedding, so we assumed that I was going to look okay.

We drove down US 1 into Key Largo and for those considering a vacation where Bogie and Bacall frolicked – don’t. The place looks like a dump, filled with tourist trap shops and other rickety constructions. (When the local high school is the best-looking building in town, you’ve got a problem.) I despaired of making it in time because the “signage” wasn’t that great but Ruth got us there, no sweat.

Speaking of no sweat – due to a cold front moving in from the north, the temperature on this south Florida beach must have been in the low 60s. I was freezing in my Cuban shirt. Ruth, who was wearing a lightweight dress, was cold as well.

Some background about the wedding. M. is a second/third generation Cuban (her mother was an infant when she left the island). E. is a first generation Peruvian. I don’t know if this says anything about either Cubans or Peruvians, but all of the men dressed in suits and all of the women dressed in skimpy little dresses with bare shoulders and high heels. I suspect that the men were warm and the women were…not warm.

The Protestant pastor came out and as it turned out not only did he conduct the entire ceremony, beginning to end, in Espanol, but he…mumbled through a lot of it, so there was no support for any nascent bilingualism. There was a delay to the wedding as the bride was still getting her hair put together – and when she came out, a strong gust of wind undid her effort. However, it was a very nice (but long) ceremony and everyone had a good time.

During the wedding reception, Ruth and I thought that as Anglo non-relatives we’d be seated with all of the 14 year old cousins. Imagine our surprise when we learned that we’d be sitting at the mother of the bride’s table. (We’ll call the bride’s mother “N”.) N. is Ruth’s good friend from Florida, and her goal was to seat all of the “interesting” people at her table, a high compliment. An old friend of N.’s (W) was sitting there with her husband, a gay male couple was there, and N’s creepy looking boyfriend was there.

Whenever N. – and her boyfriend – were not at the table, the conversation turned to what a disaster N.’s boyfriend was. N. and M. – mother and daughter – are virtual clones of each other. As N. had M. in her early twenties, N. is still in her forties and still an attractive woman so no one could figure out why she was going out with this mooching schlub. (I learned that part by listening to Ruth and W.’s conversation.) My time at the table was holding up my part of the conversation and listening to the gossip.

On Sunday, we spent a last bit of time with Ruth’s cousin and made it down to the Port of Miami to get on the boat, the Norwegian P____. Our berth was something called an “owner’s cabin”, something which we lucked into with this cruise and shall probably never luck into again. It is a two-room cabin with a king-sized bed in one room and a couch-table-flat screen TV in the other room. Furthermore, this cabin has access to the private swimming pool on Deck 14. I felt like a venture capitalist while on board.

Here are our ports of call:

Sunday: departure from Miami

Monday: at sea

Tuesday: Roatan, Honduras

Wednesday: Belize City, Belize

Thursday: Costa Maya, Mexico

Friday: at sea

Saturday: Key West, Florida

Sunday: back in Miami

Our goal – or at least, my goal – was to spend most of this cruise entirely on board. There’s nothing we want to shop for in any of these ports of call. There are excursions to various ruins but I can’t imagine spending hours of time – and money – to be trucked around to see what’s left of the ancient cultures. There’s nothing in any of these cities that met a specific goal – there was no specific museum or cultural site that was something that we hoped to see. Truth be told, we just took the trip because it happened to be leaving from Miami that weekend.

“So CINCGREEN”, you might ask, “if you don’t really want to see any of these places…then why go on a cruise at all?” The answer is that a cruise offers the ultimate get-away-from-it-all experience. We’re on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. We can’t be reached by phone except in the case of absolute emergency. We don’t have to drive to work. We don’t have to cook our own food. It’s all done for us. We can do whatever we want to do, and in this case, what we want to do is nothing.

What I really, really hate about vacations is that in a lot of cases, they’re extremely hectic with every hour micromanaged to squeeze in every bit of culture/history/socializing whatever. Before I started to go on cruises, I actually needed a vacation from my vacation. You’d return to work and you would never be rested – you’d just be utterly and completely exhausted, not good for anything.

So what did we do that was noteworthy in any way? Sunday was sort of a wash. The point of Sunday was to figure out where everything on the boat was. Among the many amenities of the P____ is something called the “Stardust Theatre” that provides shipboard entertainment. One of the rules of shipboard entertainment is that it is universally horrible. These are the dancers who weren’t good enough for off-Broadway and who might be working double-duty on board – food handler by day and dancing the light fantastic by night!

Ruth and I watched the tribute to South Beach culture and trust me – it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. When the dancers can barely kick their heels above hip level, you know it’s going to be one hour of solid boredom. Ruth and I treated it like an episode of Mystery Science Theatre where we make snide comments to each other about what we’re seeing.

There were only two dancers that seemed to have any talent. The first of these was a woman who had clearly had some ballet training and a lot of physical flexibility. Obviously, as the major talent she was showcased a lot, even though she belonged more in a circus than in a hot Miami nightclub. The other talented dancer was…her handler, whose job it is was to provide a base for her while she intertwined her body around him or when he put his hand on her hip and lifted her above his head. He had a chest built like Wayne Boring’s drawings of 1950s Superman – solid barrel chested and a man looking out of place among the other slim and trim male dancers, almost as if a bare-chested longshoreman had inadvertently stumbled on stage.

Example of the night: A young dancer writhes (or tries to) while three worshiping young men pull her skirt away – for better dancing of course.

Me: “Ooo.”

Ruth: (looking at fey dancers) “Trust me, you couldn’t find three young men on board less interested in her legs.”

On Monday, we ended up at sea. When we woke up, we were off the coast of Cuba. Ruth and I tried taking pictures but the pictures came out blank. We figured it must be some sort of picture-negating technology that only existed on the yachts of paparazzi-avoiding Russian oligarchs. But no, it just turned out that the settings of our cameras were wrong.

Monday night’s big thing was that we were invited to eat with the captain. This presented a bit of a problem as this vessel specialized in something called “Freestyle Cruising”. The last cruise we went on, for example, had a formal dinner every night where everyone attending was expected to wear suits or dresses. However, in Freestyle Cruising passengers can wear what they want to dinner – as long as you’re not going barefooted and wearing only a jockstrap.

The problem was that we came close to having nothing to wear suitable for eating with the captain. So for about $25 we had my wedding clothes pressed again on board and the white Cuban shirt was repurposed as formal wear.

For those of you wondering what kind of scintillating conversation takes place at these dinners – you’re not missing anything. The passengers seemed pretty closed mouthed and the captain, for all of his skill in running a cruise line, didn’t seem like much of a conversation starter. (I think he preferred to monologue – don’t even ask about the staff captain who was also in attendance.) The captain definitely eats well but I suspect you have to be a Swede to get the full range of his conversational firepower.

However, we got lucky. We were seated next to a couple from Wales who ran an Italian restaurant. The wife was Welsh and the husband was Italian, an interesting combination and we spent most of our time in conversation with them. She’s apparently a member of the British Bird Society as well, and our topics of conversation included ducks, magpies, rooks, crows and other various birds. Despite her politeness, I worried a bit when the topic of conversation turned to cooking and Gordon Ramsey. “Oh, I’m much worse than Gordon Ramsey,” the woman said, smiling, talking about how either she or her husband have had to whip employees into shape. They didn’t talk about it long, but I suspect that they weren’t kidding.

We’ve kept running into this couple, and they gave us their e-mail address -we definitely intend to write them. Our owner’s suite – all 780 square feet of it – might be indeed a thing of beauty but my understanding is that there are even bigger suites on board. They are virtual apartments up on Deck 14, which is where the private pool is. The two are a lot more adventurous than I am, making all sorts of walking excursions during our visits to foreign ports.

Before writing about Roatan, let’s take a brief look at the private pool on Deck 14. The pool is maybe about 30 feet by 10 feet and is surrounded by deck chairs…and things which really couldn’t be called deck chairs but deck beds, resting perfectly flat and taking up the space of six deck chairs in width. These little beds are bedecked with pillows and have little canopies that are supported by plastic poles.

There are a few tables here for the serving of breakfast, but we’ve always had breakfast in the room. Ruth enjoys the swimming pool; I come for the treadmill. I’ve managed to clock my 3.5 miles a day on the treadmill all but one of the days that I’ve been on this cruise.

As for Roatan, Roatan seemed to be a port surrounded by very touristy shops. If you dared venture outside of this little touristy barrier of buildings, you went straight into a very poor part of Roatan, Honduras. I was reminded of the song by The Clash called “Safe European Home” about not daring to venture beyond the Sheraton Hotel – I don’t know if The Clash’s song condemned others or was a self-condemnation regarding their experiences in Jamaica (their life was threatened there) but I interpreted it as the latter. All I know is that I had had enough of Roatan and Ruth and I returned back to the ship. At least I can technically say that I’ve been to Honduras in the sense that I was technically in France for about an hour during a trip to Lake Constance (Bodensee). It is the southernmost country that I’ve ever visited, but if I were to tell you that I’ve truly experienced Honduras I would be lying.

That was Tuesday. Today, we felt that we had to get off the ship again and visited Costa Maya in the most perfunctory sense. For a sense of at least my experience, see the previous paragraph. It seems that that’s all there is on this cruise – little resort villages surrounded by poverty. Is Belize the same? I don’t know. Is Key West the same? Well, you might feel more comfortable there but I’ve been to Key West and it’s a dump of a city. If you like to drink a lot of cheap beer you’ll like Key West. Key West does have live chickens in the streets and it has Ernest Hemingway’s house with his six-toed cats, but other than that? Not much. We’ve resolved that for future cruises, us Ugly Americans are going to Europe.

Most of my interest on this cruise has come from the interesting people we’ve met. The majority of contacts have come from a group of messageboard users (not the PP-MB) who provide criticism of cruise lines. (Ruth is a part of this community.) Rather than sending Ruth and friends hate mail – like the kind you get if you review fanfic - the ship seems to have bent over backwards to make this group feel at home. Unfortunately, like most message board inhabitants, they might be great at socializing on-line but they have virtually no social skills in the real world. So our contacts with this group have been limited and I suspect that Ruth is greatly disappointed.

When it comes to starting conversations, Ruth is a master. It’s almost like a super power, one that comes from years of working in sales. This group has not given Ruth much to work with but there are a couple of exceptions. One exception comes from a couple we ate with in a ship restaurant called the Summer Palace. The décor of the Summer Palace attempts to evoke the pre-Revolution period in Russia – Edwardian fixtures with a lot of paintings of Czar Nicholas II and his doomed family. We met a couple of what appeared to be one of those May-December romances – young woman marries old man.

Shows what I know. The young woman was approximately the age of the older man but was in a lot better shape – the older man had Type II Diabetes (no shots) and had recovered from a stroke. She was a graduate of Weight Watchers and was in great shape. We discussed our dreams of emigrating to Canada but the couple told us that health care in Canada isn’t what it’s cracked up to be – Canadian doctors didn’t diagnose the man’s stroke properly but American doctors did. They didn’t think much of Canadian health care. (As opposed to the ship’s captain, who had nothing but praise for Sweden’s social welfare system.)

As it turned out, this was her fourth marriage – her last, she promised. She kept horses. Very pleasant conversation, but looking at the guy I suspect that she’ll be on Husband #5 sooner or later.

Last night, however, we hooked up with the messageboard group again. We ate at a Benihana’s type Japanese restaurant where the food is served in front of you. There were about fifteen people there including ourselves, most about as talkative as rocks. But it was then that we discovered the great secret that I shall impart with you….

…just as it was said in the Old West that “God did not make men equal, Colonel Colt did”, the man who has the power to break the barriers of social skills or life experience or class is not named God. His name is Jim Beam. Or Jack Daniels. Or Guiseppe Martini. A few of the message board patrons had a couple of martinis on a two-for-one special…and after that, you couldn’t shut them up. (We should have been sitting next to those guys.)

The high point of last night wasn’t the display of culinary skills from the chefs. It was when one of the Canadian board posters returned to the table and conversation turned to the Canadian national anthem. Someone asked him if he knew the words, and as it turned out he did know the words and sang the Anthem “every Thursday” because he belonged to some sort of military service club.

With that information, two sloshed message board posters stood up and began belting out the lyrics to “Oh Canada”. Everyone who remembered the lyrics – or at least everyone who remembered 80 percent of them, like us – stood up and began singing our hearts out for the Great White North.

After we had finished “…we stand on guarddddd…forrrr…THEEEE!!!” the adjoining table of restaurant patrons – who were not affiliated with the message board – could not let that stand. They stood up and began to belt out the American National Anthem. So, everyone in the restaurant – us and them – began singing “Oh say, can you see?/By the dawn’s early light…!” All of the singing must have given the piano bar downstairs some consternation.

Jingoistic? Maybe. I was tempted to start singing the only words I knew from the second verse of the National Anthem. “On the shore dimly seeeeeen/In the midst of the deeeeep….!”

Friday, November 12

We’re now back at sea. Last night was the worst night of the trip as far as the motion of the boat was concerned. On a large vessel, motion is virtually minimal. However, if you’re at the front of the boat you’re more likely to feel the boat’s motion, and we’re at one of the fore-most cabins. Besides, even if your boat is skyscraper-sized the sea is a lot bigger than your boat and if the sea’s going to be very choppy the boat’s going to move, period.

Ruth had a lot of trouble sleeping. She took a couple of Bonine for motion sickness and moved out of the bed (with its soft mattress) and on to the much-firmer couch. As for me, the motion of the boat doesn’t really affect me. Maybe I would have made a great sailor in some past life.

Last night, the entertainment on board was the cast of Second City, the comedy troupe. Well, okay, not the Second City in Chicago or Toronto – I’m assuming those guys aren’t coming onto a boat. I suspect that this Second City troupe is some sort of B-team Second City, the way the Groundlings in Los Angeles have a B-group. There’s a real possibility that some of the performers I saw last night might be major stars on the order of Mike Myers or John Belushi. Or possibly, well-known character actors like George Wendt – all of whom are alums of Second City. Or possibly…they’ll become nobody at all.

Anyway, they were all very funny. They performed most of their sketches as “blackouts” – a short vignette would be performed, the lights would go down and the performers would set up for another scene. There was an improv scene based on one of the couples in the audience, the conceit being that the particulars of how the couple met would be turned into a romantic movie. For some reason, the guy in the couple picked was ludicrously vague about what he did. Despite the fact that he and his wife had been married for 30 years or so, the only details given were that he worked with umpires in major league baseball. Of course, being professionals the Second City staff took the premise and ran with it, turning their male protagonist into a complete cipher. (“I’m having thoughts and feelings right now!”) The improv was the funniest thing all night and we’ll probably see them again.

As bookends to our improv experience were the screening of a Disney short subject called “Destino”. Destino was a planned short film by Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. The storyboards of the movie were created and Dali painted several scenes but the project never came to fruition and was believed lost until the storyboards were discovered a few years ago. Disney finally put together an animated short which won some awards. It was visually interesting, but I suspect that Disney whimsy and Dali’s bizarre subversions of reality don’t mix well – people forget about how smart Disney was; he knew when something was going to work on screen and when something wasn’t.

After the improv, we went to the piano bar to play “Name That Tune”. God, what a disaster. You got the impression that the piano bar player didn’t really care to be there – it seemed that he really struggled to keep his omnipresent grin alive and every now and then he’d say something marginally inappropriate. (“Drink up, people, we have to keep our bar staff busy.”)

Earlier this week, we had won a Trivia challenge – it was no contest, as most of the ship was at shore – and we won a few prizes like…a beach ball…and a luggage tag. The “Name That Tune” game was offering similar prizes. Twenty tunes would be played and we’d have to guess what those tunes were. Here is the list of tunes, so see if you can pick these out:

1. Take Five, the Brubeck instrumental

2. On Broadway

3. You Are the Sunshine of my Life

4. California Girls, by the Beach Boys

5. Dancing in the Moonlight

6. Teach Me Tonight

7. Sailing, the Christopher Cross tune

8. I Only Have Eyes for You

9. Cabaret

10. Don’t be Cruel

11. Margaritaville

12. The Gambler

13. There Will Never Be Another You

14. Girl from Ipanema

15. Achy Breaky Heart

16. Hotel California

17. Unforgettable, the Nat King Cole standard

18. Strangers in the Night

19. My Girl

20. Music of the Night, from Phantom of the Opera

If your taste is eclectic enough, you should know all of these tunes. (#6 and #13 might throw you.) We didn’t even bother to hang around for the judging. We slam-dunked the competition, and needing no more luggage tags or decks of ship playing cards, we left.

Ruth and I walked through the casino, a very popular place on board a cruise ship. One of the games there – a game neither of us have played – involves shoving change into a slot. The change bounces around and lands on a shelf in such a way that it lands on the back of the shelf, and has the potential to push the change in front of it forward, as the shelves slowly shuffle back and forth. If the change in front is shoved forward enough, it falls off one shelf and lands on another, where the same process takes place. Any change falling off the final shelf due to this chain reaction is won by the player.

A woman won one of the bundles of currency that had been placed on the bottom shelf by the casino and which had finally been tipped off the edge. The problem was that the money was stuck and the customer couldn’t reach it. So while the player kept guard, Ruth and I called in the casino staff and they freed her winnings. The outer bill on the currency wad was a ten-dollar bill. Underneath it were…two ones. Twelve dollars total.

So Ruth had to do this as well, particularly after she shoved in a quarter and got four quarters back. Knowing probability, I just can’t watch this happen – it’s like watching someone set fire to their money. I left Ruth to play and retreated back to the room. Ruth returned later, and I asked her what happened to her change.

Me: “Did you quit while you were ahead?”

Ruth: “Yes.”

Me: “Really?”

Ruth: “No.”

Saturday, November 13

We are now at Key West, Florida and officially in the United States. This morning, we were forced up out of bed before 9 am to pass through U. S. Customs – we’ve been to three countries between leaving Miami and showing up at Key West and this is the first time we’ve been asked to file by Border Patrol. The disadvantage is in having to deal with it; the advantage is that we won’t have to deal with it in Miami.

We actually made it out of the boat this time. Ruth has been to Key West several times; this is my second time. Unless you’re a real fan of Jimmy Buffett or unless you have a severe alcohol problem, there’s no real reason to spend any time in Key West although there are a few attractions worth seeing like the Ernest Hemingway house. Our goal was to find a pharmacy and an ATM, and sure enough we found a CVS pharmacy and purchased thank-you cards for our various gratuities.

Yesterday, a select group of suite holders were given a tour of the bridge. I imagined that it would be something out of an old 1940s movie, with twenty guys running around like mad, bells ringing and a wizened captain at the helm. Instead, I find out that there are only three people on board the bridge. Oh, there’s room for more but it only really takes three people to stir the ship.

The bridge looks more like that of Captain Picard’s Enterprise rather than that of The Hunt for Red October. There is indeed a navigation/helm station front and center which can seat two, and there is a small understated black chair behind it. There are some other stations around the bridge for radar, but there’s also a kitchenette, and a clear table at the port side of the bridge with four chairs where ship officers undoubtedly play poker.

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. This ship is a floating hotel, and they’re going to make this vessel as much like an airplane as possible – hyper computerized and almost capable of piloting itself. If there was any drama to be gained, that drama was systematically eliminated through years of cruise ship design. It’s all “press a button and go now”. The computerized displays of ship position looked interesting, but I’m sure there’s a version of Microsoft Cruise Ship Simulator which has the same displays. To me, the most interesting part of the tour was the telephone where the ship’s most crucial officer could address the passengers.

There is an array of cameras throughout the ship where the pilots can monitor various locations, ships thrusters, etc. There are two locations on board where the bridge can view the goings-on 24 hours a day – those cameras never change. They are focused on the ship’s laundry and the ship’s bakery, which are probably the most likely locations of a fire.

Is this where the captain talks to those on board? No, this is the phone used by A., the cruise director, letting us know that there’s an art auction in the Spinnaker Lounge.

After the cruise, we met the couple from Wales mentioned earlier for drinks. Six of us shared some drinks – Ruth and I, the couple from Wales and another couple from Australia. R., the husband of the Wales duo, ordered a bucket of Coronas and I had two of those while everyone talked about the various world locales they had visited on cruise ships.

R. told an interesting story of his trip to Honduras. R. and his wife M. are quite adventuresome, and they walked through the poor part of Roatan ending up at a bar they had been told about. The bar, apparently, is a stop for the ship’s crew. As R. put it, the bar is noteworthy in that…romantic affection can be purchased there. Crew members from various cruise lines can purchase this affection twenty minutes at a time – if necessary, as most of the time the crew members don’t need this much affection. However, one crew member disappeared behind the curtain for the entire twenty minutes. When he returned, the entire bar applauded him for his accomplishment.

(Ruth says I'm mixing up two different stories. Oh well.)

I always wondered what the 1100 or so members of the crew did while they were not working. Now, I know. It’s also noteworthy that 600 of these crew members work in food service. Every restaurant we go to the passengers are asked to wash their hands with antiseptic solution; I hope the crew is doing the same thing.

We would have dinner with the Welsh couple and that dinner would help us solve 1/3 of a problem. We were given three free bottles of booze as a gift, but we were not given any corresponding way to transport it back to the United States – except, perhaps, to hide it in a suitcase. One of our free bottles was Moet et Chandon champagne, and we popped the cork with our friends in one of the ships restaurants. I finished two flutes of champagne to go with the two bottles of beers, and I was not safe to drive on either land or sea. We were going to watch some of the ship’s “entertainment” but we passed on that and headed straight to bed at about 10 pm – both of us tipsy and inexplicably quite tired.

Sunday, November 14

Right now, we’re in hurry-up-and-wait to get back to Atlanta. I woke up at 7 am in preparation for our planned departure from the boat. When I woke up, the boat was already docked and the staff was busy cleaning up.

The rule was that we had to be out of the room by 9 am and off the boat by 10 am. Believe it or not, at 2:30 pm the boat would be welcoming aboard the next group of cruise tourists. I’m shocked at the quick turnaround; maybe you need to have 1100 crew members for a turn-around that fast.

We gave a gratuity to Jongie, to Emelia and to Carlos – our housekeeper, butler and concierge respectively. When we hit the main dining room, the place was packed, and the hardest part of the meal was finding a seat. I had the last of my French toast this morning, and with the luggage already consigned to the bag program (the stewards have already packed it off to Georgia), the only things left to haul off the boat were ourselves.

All that was left was to take care of the process in reverse. Impatient, we took a taxi back to the Miami Airport. It appeared that a Haitian theology student was our driver, and Ruth and the driver had a nice chat about Miami landmarks. After that, through security, the X-ray, etc. and into the bowels of Miami International Airport with 3 hours and 40 minutes to kill.

The flights are all screwed up. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 1:40 pm, but it’s been delayed to 2:20 pm. I think I’ve had enough of vacation, or at least enough of Miami International Airport. I can’t get home soon enough.

So would I do it again? Hell yes. But next time, we’re doing it in Europe. Or we might even take that tour of Israel and the Holy Land, echoing the cry of a few of Ruth’s relatives, “Next year, in Jerusalem!” But it doesn’t have to be the Holy Land where Jesus made the stations of cross. If you give me cruise ship amenities with interesting conversation and without any requirement to get off the boat, then any dump of a port is Holy Land enough for me.

Departure

For a little over a week.

Will be back. Pics, no. Film, maybe.

Tonsillectomy

When you start to get old - right now, I'm "young middle aged" - you think about all of rites of passages or facts of everyday living that have disappeared in your lifetime. One of those is the tonsillectomy.

I assume that its frequency is disappearing - I have no children, but even among the adults I know who have children, you never hear that "so-and-so is getting a tonsillectomy". From what I understand, the reason is that inflamed tonsils are treated medically now rather that surgically. Furthermore, in the past tonsillectomies were sort of a prophylactic procedure, and these days physicians won't do the surgery unless there's a medical need for it.

This is from a lost link on the internet:

In recent years, there has been an increase in ADD and related difficulties among school age children. Years ago, tonsillectomies were routinely performed. Some pediatricians suggest that the decrease of tonsillectomy procedure is related to the increase in childrens' behavior problems, mood problems, and attention problems and is illustrated by the recent spate of sleep apnea related tonsillectomy.

My wife read in Vogue today that some physicians believe that ADHD and behavior problems in young children might be related to sleep apnea.

So why am I even writing about tonsillectomies? Because I was almost the beneficiary of one when I was about eight years old or so. I had frequent tonsillitis when I was a child and my parents and the MD finally decided to have my tonsils removed. I ended up showing up at the hospital, staying overnight, they draw my blood, it's the morning of surgery, and....

...nothing. Apparently, my blood clotting factor wasn't high enough to satisfy the doctor. No surgery. I'd just have to deal with it medically. According to my parents, I've always snored even when I was a thin little child.

I'll bet a lot of my depression problems and lack of an attention span might have had something to do with persistent sleep apnea. After I finally treated the apnea with a CPAP machine, my energy level and mood changed significantly. Maybe they should have done the surgery.

Electile Dysfunction

Today is Election Day in the United States, or as some people think of it "Freedom From Political Commercials Day". There's not so much a sense of satisfaction in our household as there is of relief that every ten minutes we won't be blasted by some nasty political commercial that insults the intelligence.

I've been debating about whether or not I wanted to vote at all, and I finally decided that I would vote - coming to the conclusion that if I wait for the system to deliver candidates that I wanted to vote for then I'd wait forever. Even if I crafted a system to my personal liking, I suspect that I'd still be dissatisfied with the candidates that system produced. So, with virtually zero enthusiasm, I went down to my local polling station to punch the Diebold buttons. So where my votes honestly tabulated? Inshallah, as they say in the Middle East. (Or, as they say in American, "it is what it is.")

This being a mid-term election, the turnout was pretty dismal. Georgia is essentially a one-party state. Which means that the only Republicans voting are voting out of civic duty and the Democrats probably aren't voting at all. If you're a Democrat, you're essentially disenfranchised here - your vote doesn't count. This isn't liberal whining; if you're a Republican living in New York it's the same difference. To add insult to injury, not only does your vote not count but in national elections since all electoral votes are based upon state population it means that living in Georgia just grants a greater chance of extra electoral votes to be distributed to Republicans.

I got in and out of voting in about 20 minutes. Ten of those minutes were spent transporting myself. Parking was ample. Lines were non-existent. I wasn't the only one there, but there were only about four or five people voting that morning. The poll-worked looked like exactly the same poll workers that I saw the last time. Most likely, they are wrapped in plastic with the voting machines and plugged back in every four years or so.

So who did I vote for in this powerful, life-changing etc. etc. midterm election?

Governor: The choice was between Roy Barnes (Democrat) and Nathan Deal (Republican). In terms of policy, each was indistinguishable from the other, both racing to see who could be the most God-loving, gay-bashing, gun-shooting so-and-so ever to be governor of Georgia since Lester Maddox wielded an ax-handle. However, Roy Barnes in one of his commercials said something quite astonishing - namely, that "people are laughing at us" for our electoral stupidity, which they are. Anyone who could say something like that gets my vote. It might have lost him some votes but it got mine.

Senator: Johnny Isakson (Republican) vs. Designated-Victim-No-One-Has-Ever-Heard-Of (Democrat). I voted for the latter guy. Isakson's a creep. If Satan were running against Isakson, I might not vote for Satan but I'd at least listen to his platform.

Representative: Tom Price (Republican) vs - quite literally - nobody. Georgia has some of the most restrictive ballot access laws in the United States. It's a strict two-party duopoly. According to the link:

The law says only qualified write-in candidates can have their votes counted, and candidates who have run for the office in the primary and lost are not eligible to be a qualified write-in candidates.

To be a qualified write-in candidate only requires sending a notice to the Secretary of State's Office and running a legal ad in a newspaper. Only two write-in candidates bothered to meet the criteria. The two qualified write-in candidates for governor are David C. Byrne of Kennesaw and Neal Horsley of Carrollton. Their names will not be on the ballot, but they are the only two names you can write in and have their votes counted.

Every position on the ballot has a write-in option - including Price's - but as you can guess, you can not only write in a very limited selection of those names, but you don't even know who those names are! How the fuck am I supposed to know who took out an ad in the paper to qualify for the write-in ballot for Congressman? So I refused to rubber-stamp Price's selection and left that part of the ballot empty.

Other statewide offices: Knew virtually nothing about the candidates, only party affiliation. I'm not voting a straight party ticket. I expect to have at the very least a visceral reaction to names. Skipped all of the parts of the ballot selecting a Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, State Agricultural Commissioner, etc. etc.

Local judgeships: Nothing more than a random collection of names. Pass.

Local voter initiatives: Five constitutional amendments. We amend our constitution over every ridiculous little thing. If any of the amendments looked like a Suspension of State Law in Favor of Big Business, it went down to defeat. (The way the amendments are written are far from neutral, which occasionally provides a clue as for whom or what the law is written for.) The only thing I voted for was the $10 fee for certain license plates to fund trauma centers in Georgia.

"My God! An increase in the vehicle tag fee! SOCIALISM! EEEEEEE!!!"

Local annexation: We live in an unincorporated part of our county. Local annexation would attach us to a community. Could be good, could be bad, who knows? I asked Ruth and she said, "Vote yes", so I made an informed decision and voted "yes".

The end.

It was about as fun as having your teeth scraped. There, I did it, leave me alone and stop preaching at me you liberal/conservative douchebags. Next time anyone talks to me about the civil duty of voting, etc. etc. I'm going to punch them in the mouth.

A Man, A Plan, A Canal

Where I start: State Road 80, Near Johnny Mercer Boulevard, Savannah, Georgia
Where I end up: Intersection of State Road 80 (East Victory Drive) and Harry S. Truman Parkway, Savannah, GA
Total distance on map: 5.169 km
Spare kilometers for next run: +0.11 kilometers

This is where I'm at right now. I'm running along this bridge, but I don't know if I'm going to the left or to the right.



I believe that I'm also running alongside the Casey Canal. From the Wikipedia article on Savannah.

Savannah is prone to flooding. Four canals and several pumping stations have been built to help reduce the effects: Fell Street Canal, Kayton Canal, Springfield Canal and the Casey Canal, with the first three draining north into the Savannah River.

So now you know.

My Misgivings About the Rally for Sanity/Fear

Mark Ames has a different take

From "The Rally to Restore Vanity: Generation X Celebrates Its Homeric Struggle Against Lameness". Let's just say that Mark Ames didn't think much of the rally and leave it at that.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all–looking stupid. That’s why they’ve turned Stewart into a demigod, because he knows how to make the other guys look really stupid, and if you’re on the same team as Stewart, you’re on the safe side of the mockery, rather than dangerously vulnerable to mockery.

In fact, I think this is why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama: because he made them look stupid. They made themselves vulnerable to looking stupid by believing in him–and he jilted them. That’s how they see it–not that politics is a long ugly process that has nothing to do with self-esteem and everything to do with money and brawling–it was more like an “indie” consumer choice: They bought into the Obama brand, wore it, and suddenly discovered that the label wasn’t as cool as it seemed at the time, especially after the sentimental high of electing a half-black president wore off to the hard slog of what came after… so they threw the Obama jeans away and went to work trying to salvage their coolness creds for having made that fashion mistake.

(* * *)

I am very tempted to vote during this next election. Not because I've "seen the light" and now love my future Democratic/Republican overlords, but because of something I read on this website:

There is always another perspective from which to view these things…. The rulers of every regime demand flattery. Democracy is no different. We are the rulers, and demand that we be considered vituous. Hence all ills of society must be blamed on others. Evil, perhaps insane our traitorous, follow Americnans (of the right or left, depending on our current mood). Or evil foreigners. Best of all, the “system” — through the wonder of abstraction avoiding the painful necessity of assigning responsibility.

All we must do is wait for politicos to arrive that are worthy of us, for whom we can vote and begin a new age. Or, alternatively, these evils will grow until things collapse in a cleansing fire. On these ashes a new world will arise.

Perhaps so. I’ll bet that instead …
1. The government continues more or less corrupt as are we ourselves.
2. The government improves (or deteriorates) more or less proportionate to changes in our willingness to get involved in it.

Maybe we've become so self-flattering that we're treating our votes like a royal grant or a knighthood. "What? You, Mr. Politician, are not worthy of my fine vote. You have not bowed deeply enough to me."

I'm still thinking about all of this. I do know that I'll be voting on the Chamblee annexation issue. But like most Americans, I still don't know how I'll vote.

(* * *)

Where I start: Where Suncrest Boulevard meets State Road 80, Savannah, Georgia
Where I end up: State Road 80, Near Johnny Mercer Boulevard, Savannah, Georgia
Total distance on map: 4.160 km
Spare kilometers for next run: +0.04 kilometers

I'm very close to "Island Miniature Golf and Games", so if I wanted to I could stop my run/walk and play a few holes.

I'm still on the Islands Expressway, in an area which is close to "Whitemarsh Island". By the way, if you want to know who Johnny Mercer is, as it turns out he wrote a crapload of songs. Now I know who (at least co-)wrote "Jeepers Creepers," "That Old Black Magic" and "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate_the_Positive".

The Amazing Run

Where I start:On State Road 80 off the Fort Pulaski National Monument, ready to turn into Savannah, Georgia
Where I end up: Where Suncrest Boulevard meets State Road 80, Savannah, Georgia
Total distance on map: 3.782 km
Spare kilometers for next run: +0.18 kilometers

This part of State Road 80 is called the "Islands Expressway" and we are now running alongside a four-lane highway which is heading towards Savannah. I seem for now to be running through a very expensive area of Savannah. From what I can tell, there are houses on sale here that range up to $600,000. I'm still in the Tybee Island area of Savannah, in an area that appears to be held Talahi Island. Nothing but traffic and retirees out here. If I see anything interesting on the map, I'll let you know.

In a Glass Cage of Emotion

Last night, I attended my first National Hockey League game in about five years or so. The reason was that my employer was offering marked-down tickets and I asked my wife if it was something she wanted to do. Myself, I can really take hockey or leave it but my wife had some ice-skating lessons and had played some hockey and she decided she wanted to see the game.

And so I went.

The venue: The venue is Philips Arena in Atlanta, GA. I've been to about a zillion Atlanta Dream games and am very familiar with Philips - but never as a hockey venue. The hard part of Philips Arena is that it's in downtown Atlanta and if you've never been there it can be daunting. As for me, I only know one specific way to get there and one specific way to leave there. Whenever the Atlanta city government has to close a road, it's always daunting.

There are two cheap parking areas in the bowels of the stadium. One is uncovered and from what I year, you have a great chance of getting your car broken into if you park there. The other area is covered, and has a nice stairwell which leads you right into Philips at about the 200 level. Don't ask me how to give you directions; I couldn't tell you.

Seats: We were sitting in Section 312 - approximately six rows away from the back wall of the arena. The 300 sections are very high up and they are steep. My wife has a fear of heights and the steepness of the angle nearly gave her vertigo.

Incidentally, the face value of these tickets is $45. For Section 312, which is why I shall never attend a hockey game in Atlanta unless the seats are marked down to the $20s again. There is no reason why anyone but the most fanatic of sports fans should ever spend $45 for a sporting event unless you're virtually sitting in the front row. The experience of seeing a live sporting event is great - but not $45 great.

Truth be told, the view from Section 312 is fantastic. You're looking right over the ice. If you actually want to see the game, the 300s might be the best place from which to do it.

National Anthem: Everyone stood for the National Anthem, which they do at Atlanta Dream games. With a sample of n=1 majority white male audience vs. a sample of n => 50 majority black female audiences, the relationship to the anthem seemed to be different - positively reverent vs. merely respectful.

Furthermore, everyone shouted at the word NIGHT. I'm sure this is some part of Thrashers fan arcana that completely perplexes non-fans. The Atlanta Thrashers had a "teachable moment" they could have used to integrate first-time viewers into the complexities of the community of Thrashers fans - and they blew it. "At the National Anthem, we Thrashers fans shout on NIGHT because...." Put it up on the Jumbotron. Ten seconds.

Ambiance: Attendance was listed at 10,172 for the game. If you believe that there were actually 10,172 people at that game - you are either a liar, or you don't know that much about estimating attendance.

A sellout for the Atlanta Dream is about 9500 or so, at least an announced sellout. That usually translates into about 6000 living, breathing people, all of whom have been restricted to the lower two levels of Philips. Sitting from high up gave me a good chance to estimate attendance. If you had taken everyone at the arena and shoved them into the lower bowl, you would have had about as many seats filled as you'd have at a Dream sellout. There were entire rows on the lower arena with only one or two people sitting in them.

So the NHL is fibbing about its attendance. Big deal. Major league baseball does it. The WNBA does it. The NBA does it. I'm assuming that pretty much every sport out-and-out lies about its bodies-in-seats attendance. The multiplier seems to be about 0.65 to multiply the stated attendance by to get actual attendance, except at true, obvious sellouts.

It seems that most of the people choose to sit at the end of the rink, behind the goalies. Maybe they think it's cheaper that way. Sounds like a horrible place to watch a hockey game.

There is a lot of bombast at a NHL game. They were actually louder than Atlanta Dream games. Not in terms of fan shouting, but in terms of loudspeaker volume. In Dream games the overhead is on and you can hear it; in Thrashers games the volume is turned up to permanent shift of hearing levels.

Maybe I'm too used to the Atlanta Dream games, but the Atlanta Thrashers games seem to be rather inconsistent in attempts to movitate the crowd. The organ music - or pumped up rock songs - are just annoying, the music always seems to chime in during rather pedestrian seeming events. (Like a bunch of guys standing around for a minor face-off after some whistle that has brought action to a complete stop for about two minutes.) At Dream games, there is a better sense of musical direction, where the really loud stuff seems to kick in only after something really dramatic - like, say an Angel McCoughtry steal and fast-break resulting in a basket.

There's a lot of reliance on canned video - non-live video, that doesn't seem to motivate the crowd that much. The rest of the experience is quite similar to the Dream experience. Cam shots. Trivia quizzes for prizes. Silly games during intermissions. (But fewer - it seems that NHL fans are enthralled by the man driving the Zamboni.)

The Thrashers do have the Kiss Cam. How I feel about the Kiss Cam is another blog post. And of course, they ended their Kiss Cam exhortions by focusing the cam on two male Buffalo Sabres fans, har-de-har-har. I'll just add two comments and let it go:

a) they're too gutless to put the Kiss Cam up during an Atlanta Dream game, because everyone knows of course that even exposure to one loving lesbian kiss will turn your children instantly gay.
b) if I ever go to a sports game with a guy, I'm telling him, "you'd better make sure you're sitting one seat away from me, because if they put the two of us up on that kiss in that homophobic har-de-har-har, then buddy you're getting tongued." And I'm as straight as an arrow.
c) of course, it might not have been a homophobic har-de-har-har. It could have just been an older Buffalo Sabres fan and his older wife who kind of looks like a man now after passing seventy. You never know. Even so, my two previous points stand.

Hanging from the roof of the arena are two gigantic plastic Thrasher heads in profile. During player introductions, Thrashers goals and other high points of the game, these heads breathe fire. Since it can be cold in a hockey arena, and since 312 puts us close to the threads, goals meant one could warm one's self by the fire. My wife suggested sticks and marshmallows.

The fans: Hard to tell. They're really just like Atlanta Dream fans with better jerseys. Mostly white and male.

I hated going to baseball games in Florida because after a few drinks, the crowd gets really obnoxious. The Atlanta crowd seemed to be okay, except for one guy at the lower level who kept screaming at the top of his lungs, "BUFFALO SUCKS!" Then again, in the 300 levels I was removed from most human contact.

There was, however, a very large group of loud, vocal fans who cheered on the glories of their team. Unfortunately, they were Buffalo Sabres fans. In the WNBA, you don't see a lot of enemy jerseys because the league has only been around for 15 years and there's not a lot of expatriate loyalty to outside teams. I suspect that's different in the NHL - at times, it seemed like Atlanta fans were getting out-shouted by transplanted upper New Yorkers.

The game: I know virtually nothing about hockey, except a few facts:

a) it is a sport played on ice,
b) if you do something bad, they put you in the box - and then, you feel shame
c) putting the puck in the net is one point.

The rest I was able to surmise, along with some help from my wife who has actually played the sport. Unlike basketball, I figured it was a sport much like football in that the more you held the ball - or controlled the puck - the more likely it was for you to score.

Buffalo proved that right at the beginning. In the first period, Buffalo's goalie could have brought out an Ottoman, propped his feet up and read a magazine because all of the action was taking place near the Atlanta goal. Sooner or later, probability would shift in favor of the Sabres and they went up 1-0.

Atlanta managed to score a goal halfway into the first, but had it taken away due to a boarding penalty by the Thrashers' Nik Antropov. "Boarding", I guess, is when you slam someone into the boards in a way that betrays a lack of common decency. Maybe you break wind on someone, I don't know, but Antropov was put in the box and made to feel shame, and Jordan Leopld scored on the power play to make it 2-0 Buffalo.

Among the various incomprehensible random facts flashed on the screen, one was very interesting - that Buffalo was among the worst teams in the league in "penalty killing". Penalty killing is what you do when one of your players has been made to feel shame - down one player, you try to randomly twiddle the puck around and keep it away from anyone who could score with it. I think that the Sabres had two players feeling shame when Atlanta scored their first goal in the second period. Four minutes later, Alexander Burmistrov added another goal and the score was tied 2-2 after the second. For the 19-year old Burmistrov, it was his very first NHL goal.

As for the quality of play - it was lacking. My wife kept complaining about how everyone seemed to be out of position and that the puck-handling skills weren't good. According to Ruth, passes should go right onto the end of the other player's stick, not in the general direction of the other player. There seemed to be a lot of chasing the puck around after an errant pass, which reminded me of the essentially random nature of hockey. Unlike basketball, where the ball is pretty much in your control at all times and if you make a crappy pass it goes out of bounds (and if you don't score within 24 seconds, you lose the ball), in hockey the action might be randomly determined by whenever this little black rock slides off to and whichever players happen to catch up with it. (In a way, the NHL is much like quidditch.)

To a neophyte, it looked rather sloppy - a bunch of guys wearing plastic futilely swatting at the puck. It could even be a little bit dull sometimes, but the night was lightened up by the hostility between the two teams which really didn't seem to like each other that much. In the first period, Bryan Little got checked into the boards by the Sabres' Shaone Morrisonn. (Correct spelling.) Morrisonn received no penalty while Little ended up on the ice holding his bloody face, and was taken out of the game with a concussion. There were no riots, but you could tell that Atlanta was sensitive about the whole thing.

Buffalo kept racking up the penalties. A roughing penalty tacked on to the end of the second quarter put Atlanta in the power play (Buffalo down a player) to start the third - and fifty seconds later, the Thrashers scored again, 3-2. There were still 19 minutes of hockey to play. So we waited and waited and waited. With three minutes or so left in the game, we thought the chances of Buffalo scoring again were pretty slim, so we left.

Mistake. With eight seconds left in regulation, Derek Roy managed to shove the puck into Atlanta's net from close range to tie the game 3-3 and send it into overtime. We tuned over to 680 The Fan to verify Atlanta's victory over the radio, and was surprised to hear that the game was still in progress. The game went into a five minute overtime period and could have ended in a tie, but Dustin Byfuglien hit a goal with just 29 seconds remaining in overtime to give Atlanta the 4-3 victory as the first team scoring in overtime is given the victory.

"I'm in a glass cage of emotion right now!" was Thrasher announcer Dan Kamal's cry. My wife and I chuckled at the profoundness and incomprehensibility of that.

Overall assessment: Better than average, but not by much. The seats are way too expensive for us to see hockey regularly in person. No one really famous out there on the ice. The hockey was very sloppy at times. It cost $5.50 for a Coke, but you could refill it infinite times and make use of the Philips Arena bathrooms.

The sight lines were very good. Crowd was sparse. I don't know enough about hockey to truly appreciated it and missed all of its subtleties. Bryan Little disappeared from the ice and we never learned what happened to him during the game. People got to ride the Zamboni. Not a bad way to kill a few hours, if you don't mind paying $20 a ticket. We might do it again, but we're not in a hurry to do so.

Superheroes, Chicken, Cross Country

There's an interesting map at the Patchwork Nation website, where you can enter your county and it will tell you what kind of county it is?

Is it a Boom Town?
Is it an Evangelical Epicenter?
Is it Tractor Country?

As it turns out, I grew up in an Evangelical Epicenter. I have now ended up in a Monied Burb. I'd rather live in the latter than the former.

Here's a story about the town I grew up in. You might not know this, but the state of Kentucky is divided into wet and dry counties. (There is also a subcategory of "moist counties", which have one city as wet.) In a dry county, the sale of alcoholic beverages is not permitted. Drinking is not against the law, and you can bring alcohol in from a wet country into a dry county. Of course, you can only bring enough for your personal use and not for resale.

These laws do very little to stop drunkenness or crime. As a matter of fact, methamphetamine use is a real problem in my home town. People drug themselves in other ways, like prescription medications. The local religious hierarchy - deeply intertwined with local government - has put a stop to my home county becoming wet. I'm sure the bootleggers were more than happy to assist with any fund-raising in such efforts.

Anyway, back to the story. My hometown has a rivalry with a neighboring town whose only claim to fame is that the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise was founded there. (There used to be billboards in Chickenville, long ago, that read, "N_____, don't let the sun set on you in Chickenville.')



If the fear was that blacks would lower property values, rest assured, Armageddon couldn't have lowered the property values in Chickenville. The place was a rock-bottom dump back then and despite Harlan Sanders, remains one today.

So our dubious little paradise always had the joy of looking down on Chickenville. My father said this: "This town will never let Chickenville get a leg up on it." (My father didn't think much of the churched residents of our hometown.) For the longest time, the county of my hometown and the county of Chickenville were both dry. But in the 1990s, Chickenville passed a law allowing liquor to be served in restaurants as long as 70 percent of the income of the restaurant comes from food sales.

Did my hometown raise the banner of war, and shout from the throat of every fierce tongue, "the sins of Chickenville shall not be visited upon our fair city?" No. One or two years later, my hometown passed the same law. Trust me, sundown towns and dry counties do not stem from great moral principles. They stem from something baser and meaner.

(* * *)

If you ever read superhero stories, there will generally be a set of powers that are evenly proportioned out among the members of any superteam. There's one person who is very strong, one person who can fly, etc. etc. These powers, as a whole, are not duplicated. There's never been a superteam where every single person on it had the same superpower - but if they wrote such a story, it would be interesting. (Five strong heroes, five fast heroes, etc.)

Many of these powers correlate to useful tasks. After all, when one has abilities far beyond those of mortal men, one first must understand what abilities are possessed by mortal men, and for what those abilities are normally used. These tasks are usually employment-based.

Super strength - any job where you have to lift stuff for a living, or where you have to use actual strength (carpenter, furniture mover)
Super intelligence - any job where you have to calculate something (mathematician, chemist, physicist)
Super speed - any job involving travel (pilot, mail deliverer, etc.)

If you think about it, one could start with the job and come up with the superpower. Maybe somewhere out there there's a super pet groomer, or a super actuary, or a super cordon blue chef. "Activate super cordon blue chef power, which is highly specific!"

Even the basest jobs could have a super power associated with them. Take all of the shit cleaners out there. Someone on the planet must have a job cleaning up shit. I don't want to do it. You don't want to do it. And there's some poor sap out there, cleaning up dung for a living. I'll bet he wishes that he had some kind of super power or combination of super powers.

This got me to thinking about something else - what is the definition of a superlative dung cleaner? I'd assume that the person could clean dung so well that you wouldn't know that dung had ever been deposited in the spot from which it was cleaned. However, there are two ways to clean dung:

a) by sheer effort - getting some water and scrubbing, or
b) using your noggin - by using some sort of specialized detergent that makes the job a breeze - or by using some method kept secret by the International Dung Cleaners Association of America (Local 3135).

So here's my question: you are presented with two dung cleaners. Both do a mathematically equivalent job of cleaning dung. The one does it with eight hours of sweat. The other one does it with some much easier specialized method that lets him drink rum and coke for his remaining seven hours and fifty minutes. The results are the same.

Which one is the better dung cleaner? Are they equivalent because the results are equivalent? Is Dung Cleaner B cheating by using some method that Dung Cleaner A doesn't know about? Do we have to provide both sides the same methods to make the results equivalent?

This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night.

(* * *)

I'm currently traveling on Route 80 in my imaginary run, and you can find out more about this road here at the Wikipedia article.

If you're not familiar with US history, there's a famous old road that took you through the American west called "Route 66". Route 80 was actually a transcontinental route at one time, that started at Tybee Island, Georgia and took one all the way to San Diego, California. Unfortunately, in 1964 it was decommissioned in California when Interstate 8 took it over and various other city and county governments encroached on it. The current western terminus of Route 80 is at the border of Dallas and Mesquite, Texas. That would be nice if I wanted to visit my in-laws; the difference is I want to trek across the country, in my imagination anyway.

Incidentally,,,,

...my Kindle arrived today. Had to charge it up, not much time to play.

My first Kindle e-book download - Histories, by Tacitus. Total cost of e-book: $0.00.

No Post

More running today. Might think of something profound later.

Where I start: Off the Fort Pulaski National Monument, somewhere off State Road 80, Savannah Georgia.
Where I end up: Still wandering on Route 80, but hopefully, I'll end up turning into Savannah soon.
Total distance on map: 5.836 km
Spare kilometers for next run: -0.13 kilometers

Marching Through Georgia

On the treadmill, I ran/walked for 3.37 miles. This is 5.42348 kilometers.

This means that when people brag about completing a 5K, I complete one of those...three times a week. Wow. Didn't see that coming, not by a long shot. I know a guy who walks over an hour to work; he can probably cover 3.37 miles four or five times a week - going to work, and then coming back.

Let's see how far I can "run", then. At this rate, I should be able to run across the entire United States in about 1000 days or so. Let's start on the shores of Savannah, Georgia and end up somewhere in Westport, Washington.

Where I start: The Tybee Island Lighthouse, Savannah, Georgia.
Where I end up: Off the Fort Pulaski National Monument, somewhere off State Road 80, Savannah Georgia.
Total distance on map: 5.023 kilometers
Spare kilometers for next run: 0.4 kilometers

Across the road as I end, to my left is a bending river and to my right is the Fort Pulaski National Momument. Fort Pulaski guards the entrance to the Savannah River, which I suspect is on my left. This could have been an important port for the Confederacy, but since they didn't think Union troops would land on Tybee Island, they abandoned the island.

Guess what? Union troops landed, bombarded the fort and took control. That was the end of Confederate shipping through Savannah.

And that's one to grow on.

Legan Vangardians

Let me pose a thought that would be considered very reactionary, even among self-proclaimed reactionaries. (It would only be discussed behind closed doors.) This is the idea that "smart people know better". To wit:

Assume that the running of a modern government requires either information or political knowledge that it would be difficult for the masses to obtain or understand. Since leaving the government in the hands of the ignorant would be a disaster, this must never come to pass. Therefore, for the benefit of the people decision-making power should come to rest in the hands of a political elite.

This theory is illustrated in scenes from two different media: in the film The Remains of the Day and in the television series Boardwalk Empire. The scenes are so similar that I can only conclude that Empire flat-out stole its scene from Remains, a movie that few people are likely to have seen. (I only remember the scene because the rest of the movie was so dull.)

Reactionary and non-reactionary are arguing about political points. The non-reactionary implies that people have to be given what they want, or that the views of the average citizen need to be considered.

The reactionary calls a servant into the room : in the case of Remains the servant is an English butler in the 1930s and in Empire the servant is a black maid in the 1920s. The servant is queried about a series of abstract political debates relevant to the era? (Was the Hawley-Smoot tariff a good idea? What should be American trade policy? Should we go off the gold standard?) In both cases, the servant is unfamiliar with the political issues, having had no time to watch The McLaughlin Group on television between ten hours of peeling potatoes. The servant not only has no answers to the questions, but he/she doesn't even know what the questions mean.

The conclusion of the reactionary: "See? And that's the kind of person you want to give the vote to."

Would the world be better off if scientific decisions were placed in the hands of the (unelected) Grand Council of Scientists? Or economic decisions placed in the hands of the (unelected) Grand Council of Economists? Or even the (unelected) Grand Council of Computer Information Specialists? My only answer is a famous quote previously applied to economics, namely that democracy is the worst political system of Earth - with the exception of all of the other political systems ever devised.

This problem has me thinking about things due to the self-awareness reached in the fact that like most people, I don't know much about science, or economics, or computers, or health care, or religion or anything except that which I've been able to cobble together from a set of (probably very biased) sources on the internet. I couldn't make an argument about whether or not Obama's proposed health care plan is good or bad because not only do I not understand how it works, the sheer effort of understanding it could put you to sleep - and I like to consider myself intelligent enough to understand such things given enough time and effort. The problem is that I'm too busy peeling potatoes to understand it. And yet, millions of people think that they know how this thing works and how it's going to affect their lives:



Combine that with the fact that most of the very loud people out there appear to be the most ignorant, and combined with the pact that we are swamped with political commercials in the United States as the Congressional mid-term elections are coming up, I'm more angry about the electoral process and democracy than ever before. (Don't worry, I'm not going to become a fascist.) Last night, someone who I have friended on Twitter asked "how much would you pay your cable company for an option that removed all political commercials?" My wife and I pondered the question.

Our conclusion: we'd pay $100 for the privilege of not watching political commercials. Political commercials are no more than intellectual junk mail, most of the level of the spam e-mail you get for secret medicines that make your dick grow four inches longer - and in both cases, only fools fall for them.

We might both be contributing to the death of American democracy, but for any radical capitalist out there we've presented a money-making opportunity. Let the Invisible Hand rule!

Malarkey

Back in the old days, people didn't know enough about the world to make informed decisions. So their representatives, supposedly men of pragmatism, made those decisions for the people.

Our problem is that our "independent individualists", our pragmatist men-of-thought-and-action who have stepped up to Make The Common Sense Decisions for the Ignorant Masses, are just as ignorant - in their own way - as the most backwoods hillbilly that Appalachia could produce. They can't make informed decisions, either. Therefore, we're all screwed.

Women's College Basketball: The Death of a College

In 1997, a small college which had been running for one hundred years closed its door permanently. So what does this have to do with women's basketball? I found myself interested in the subject of colleges, universities and the history of higher education in the United States because I wanted to be able to write intelligently about women's basketball, of all things.

One problem with sports writers is that they write for today. It is assumed that the reader possesses a base amount of knowledge and when he (usually he) reads the sports page, he merely needs to be brought up to date. The move for "relevancy" is a pressing one, and the new fad in sports writing is to pepper one's writing with pop culture references so that a running back can be compared to Snooki or a baseball team's pitching lineup can be compared to Survivor characters. This means that fifty years from now, it will be almost impossible to read the older sports journalism which will be a hybrid of Walter Winchell gossip columns, pop-culture references and incomprehensible in-jokes. Most readers of the future will throw up their hands and these relevant writers will soon become irrelevant.

I remember reading in I, Claudius where Claudius states that he intends to write for a far-off posterity thousands of years in the future. (This gives Robert Graves a reason to fill in background data on ancient Roman society, because Claudius is assuming that his readership might not even know the names of people famous to every Roman of his time.) I thought about sports writing from the same perspective - how would we write sports if we knew that we were going to be read 100 years in the future? What would we say about sports if we assumed that our readers knew nothing about it? The problem is a difficult one, because sports writing is a running narrative of events, and there must be some sort of common understanding between the reader and the writer. The writer can't be forced to redefine everything for every new reader.

If the writer cannot and should not be establishing basic definitions, he should at least know something about the background of his or her own sport, and something beyond the obvious names of administrators and famous players. Knowing the "whats" turns sports into a recitation of dry facts, much like that of the pedestal of an ancient Roman statue listing the names of consuls who were present for some long-forgotten triumph. Knowing the "whys" of sport, however, is of the utmost importance because the "why" explains the "what".

So what about women's college basketball? That's three nouns right there, and the "college" is the part that I want to focus on.

What is called the system of higher education in the United States is founded on two types of institutions - institutions of basic education called "colleges" which provide four years of education after secondary school. The second type of institution is called a university, which provides education for those who wish to seek education beyond the four years provided by a college. The basic degree offered by a college is the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree; at a university one can be awarded higher degrees. The Master of Arts (MA) or master's degree is usually awarded after two or three years of post-graduate study; the highest distinction is the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.) degree awarded after many years of study. Those who have earned this degree may choose to call themselves "Doctor [Surname]", as if they were a medical doctor.

The United States has a multitude of these colleges and universities, many, many more than Europe has. This does not mean that Americans are smarter than Europeans. Far from it. Rather, the multitude of these institutions is the result more of historical accident than reflecting a quest for knowledge.

There are only a handful of real universities at the United States: the members of this list change from year to year, but only a few institutions in the United States inspire the awe that a Oxford or a Sorbonne might inspire in Europe:

Harvard

Yale

Stanford

University of Chicago

Johns Hopkins


...and...that's about it, really. The universities that come after this list tend to fade in and out. Some years Dartmouth is on the list, some years it isn't. Some years Northwestern is on this list, some years it isn't. But you'd probably find these five universities among anyone's top ten.

So why are there so many colleges and universities in the United States? The answer is that they're not really colleges or universities at all. At best, they should be called "trade schools" because a long time ago, that's what they were. There used to be a small group of places of higher learning in the United States, and for those that didn't want to teach at the university level, one went to a teacher's college (if one wanted to teach elementary school) or to a school of divinity (if one wanted to preach for a living) and so on.

School like Harvard and Yale became status symbols, and in America's capitalist economy, everyone wanted to be the next Harvard or Yale. Add America's flair for idealism and everyone who had a difference with his neighbors - usually religious - founded a college to preach the higher truth. Add to that historical expansion, which mean that North Dakota had to have a state university just like Virginia did. Add to that the baby boom of the 1940s-60s, which meant that there were more students and more money to chase around. Add to that what I call "educational regression", where one needs higher and higher ranking degrees to be assured of a middle-class job. (Fifty years ago, a high school education might have been good enough for clerical work.)

The result was that many of these schools got promoted. Bowman Teacher School bought a few buildings and added a handful of faculty to offer other degrees and expanded to Bowman College (which has a fine education department). The Smith School of Divinity added some extra theological courses that allowed them to offer a master's degree and became the University of Smith (which has a fine divinity department).

One way for schools to get popular was to offer entertainment, particularly by offering sports. (*) The schools with the most money offered football, a very expensive sport whereas schools with smaller budgets offered basketball because it was cheaper. The hope was that these sports teams would become a draw. To some extent, professional sports in America is partially subsidized by the education system, because most professional players are drawn from the teams that play at these colleges and universities - the professional sports class is trained by the state within the university system.

In 1971, Title IX was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law. This law prohibited discrimination based on many forms - including gender - in how a college distributes its money. In effect, this meant that college sports had to either subsidize women's sports or eliminate many of the fees they charge to students - after all, if a female student pays a student fee or the taxpayer subsidizes the state college, shouldn't all students have the same opportunity to participate in sports? There was an explosion of women's teams in every sport except full contact sports like football and certain other sports that had female-dominated variations (men's baseball vs. women's softball).

Basketball was a relatively inexpensive sport to support at the college level. It didn't require open space that had to be tended by groundskeepers. It took place indoors. It only required giving between ten and fifteen players scholarships, where their student costs would be paid for if they participated in sports. It did not require much in the way of specialized equipment. The result is that there are hundreds of colleges that participate in women's basketball, competing against each other for the honor of being a championship team. Only a minuscule percentage of their players will advance to the professional ranks and make money from basketball - but still, many women compete on college teams.

So what is this about the title "The Death of a College?" Let's go back to that college in my hometown. It was always sort of in the background growing up, but I never really thought about it much. Even in my small town, the college didn't dominate the community - some small towns in America are called "college towns" because if it weren't for the presence of the college as a central point, the town would probably be nothing without the college. My town was certainly not a college town - despite a population of under 10,000 with only about 4,000 in the city limits - despite the fact that we had a college in it.

This college was initially a "community college" - a two-year college that provided basic courses. After the two years, students would usually end their education with an "associate degree" (AD) or transfer to a four-year institution. In 1964 or so, the college promoted itself into a four-year institution, but even so it made little impact on our town.

By the 1990s, the college had a reputation for being an expensive four year school where the wealthy and stupid kids went - the college would take you if you couldn't get into anywhere else. Even so, the 1990s would be a rough decade for the hometown school. Two state universities - in the never ending business-like quest for expansion - established "annexes" which offered basic courses which would be accepted at the university level. The idea was that community teenagers would go to the annex after high school, and then go to the university which would be guaranteed to accept their transfer credits. These two annexes now directly competed with the small town college, and enrollment plummeted.

The result was that the college's endowment began shrinking into the negative numbers, and with no money, the school failed to upkeep the basics....including the library. This brought it into conflict with the triangle upon which every American college is founded:

a) accreditation, or the right to be recognized as a college
b) the power for students to obtain financial aid while attending college, which is granted by the federal government
c) the power to grant degrees, which is conferred by the state

With no library worth speaking of, the college lost its accreditation. It was now on a race against time to regain its accreditation (a) before it fell afoul of the federal government (b). However, the college was already in the red and living off student financial aid. When accreditation was lost, the federal government decided that it would not grant financial aid to any school attending this college. This meant no federal money.

I don't know if the state ever got around to (c) - stripping the power to confer degrees from the school. The school was founded by a religious denomination, and the school's belief was that this affiliation would rescue it as the denomination would not let the school fall. But it did. In December 1997, the school gave up the ghost and closed its doors permanently. Other colleges agreed to accept the credits of the students, one specific college accepted the school's historical records, and that was the end.

The place is now called a "community center". Maybe when I go back home, I'll take some pictures there.

Did sports help? No. In the 1990s the school founded a football team, but it had to compete at the lowest level of competition in the United States (NAIA, I believe). The school had mens and women's basketball for years, but never had the kind of success that could grab the town's attention. Funnily enough, if the school had been better at sports...it might have survived for a few more years. If it had had a good women's ball team - if it had any kind of good team - it might still be a thriving institution.

_________

(*) There is the "bread and circuses" theory of college sports, which goes like this. Many big schools save money by having graduate students teach, and all of those students teach from a select group of college texts, meaning that the education that a student gets at Florida State - in the basics, anyway - isn't really that good. In order to distract students from this fact, there is a lot of fol-de-rol about how important Florida State football is to the university.

It might be important, but the success of the football team has little (if anything at all) to do with one's quality of education or ability to get a job after graduation. Whereas Harvard and Yale...well, those degrees convey some influence. If you really want to insult a university in the United States, call it a "football school" or a "basketball school", two things which Harvard and Yale are certainly not.