Lauren and I put the last quarter in the state quarter collection last week.
I have been a coin collector since I was a kid, when my dad got me hooked. Stashed away in a bright purple Crown Royal bag in his dresser was a pile of American and foreign coins that he had acquired from any number of places, few of which were all that valuable but all of which were utterly fascinating. We’d go through them now and then, and every once in a while we’d try to organize them. We still haven’t succeeded on that last score, but that’s part of the fun of it.
Ever since I have kept my eye on my pocket change, much to the grand annoyance of cashiers in any number of places who always think I don’t trust them and am checking up on them. Honestly I couldn’t have told them if they’d shortchanged me or not – I was just checking the coins.
And you’d be surprised at what people will hand you in change even now. Silver. Foreign coins. Coins that haven’t been minted since my grandparents were little. It’s fun looking for them, really it is. Even today, finding a wheat cent in change can make my day.
I remember my first reaction to the new state quarters when they came out in 1999. Unfortunately I will not repeat it here. Let’s just say that the program caught me by surprise and leave it at that.
That cashier was really annoyed, but at least she had a reason for it.
When the girls were born I decided that it would be fun to collect three sets of these quarters – one for me and one each for them. And so, slowly, bit by bit, we have been pulling out of circulation all of the new and previously unseen designs and stuffing them into the appropriate slots in our folders.
Some have been hard to find – one of the Floridas, for example, took me ages to collect. Others have inundated me – I believe that for several years there has been an entire subterranean mint in the same Undisclosed Location that Dick Cheney used to run the country from devoted to producing nothing but Connecticut quarters. For a while after 9/11 I actually felt sort of guilty spending the New York ones. It seemed somehow dishonorable not to hold on to them. Eventually that began to feel too much like the old Onion headline about how someone baked a flag-shaped cake because they wanted to feel more patriotic and didn’t know what else to do, so I started spending them again. My honor did not seem to be affected one way or another.
Tabitha mostly lost interest a while ago, but Lauren has still been involved. We’d go through our change and pull out the gems. And last week we found our last holdouts – three Oklahoma-P quarters – and in they went.
It was a strange feeling, having completed a decade-long project like that.
Of course there are still unexplored vistas of quarters, should we choose to continue this project. We’ve got some gaps with the territories that followed the states, for example – few of the Northern Marianas Islands quarters find their way to Wisconsin for some reason. And I just have not had the heart to collect the “tourist attraction” quarters that they’re on to now, so those have largely gone by the wayside.
But we’ve got all fifty states from both mints producing for circulation.
That’ll do.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Computing Uphill, Against the Wind. Both Ways!
On the way home from school this afternoon, the girls and I got into a discussion about magnets.
Specifically, we started with a debate regarding how strong of a hold on the back of a car one of those magnetic pictures of a dog’s head could have. We decided after some discussion that “pretty strong” about covered it. The conversation then moved on to the fact that magnets would not harm a car in any notable way, but they would harm a computer. It would wipe your hard drive, but not a CD. Of course, they would be bad for floppy discs, too.
At this point there was a digression while I explained to my daughters what precisely a floppy disc was. Neither of them have ever seen one.
“Except as the Save icon!” Tabitha chimed in. Why it is still used as the Save icon is an interesting question.
I began using computers in the mid-1980s when they still used 3.5” floppy discs, though the discs weren’t at all floppy, being encased in plastic. The older computers that were still in use at the time, though, they had the 5.25” discs that actually were floppy. You could wave them around and they would undulate like seaweed under the ocean.
Lauren’s eyes grew big at the thought.
Then she asked me, “Did computers have monitors back then?”
Yes, I told her. The ones I used did, anyway – little 6” black and white monitors. Though as I came to think about it, that wasn’t always true either.
The first time I ever used a computer was when I was in junior high school, probably in 1979. It was a dumb terminal – a jargon term, not a name given in frustration. For those of you who grew up in the internet age, a dumb terminal was something that had no memory or computing power of its own but was connected to a mainframe computer somewhere else.
You can look up “mainframe” on your own.
It was about the size of a large typewriter, with grey cylindrical keys that made a zapping sound when you pushed them down the entire half inch by which they stuck up above the beige surface of the terminal.
You can look up “typewriter” too, while you’re at it.
Mounted on the right side was a reel-to-reel arrangement that fed an inch-wide strip of pink paper from the back reel through a dot-matrix hole punch and onto the front reel. When you wanted to do any actual programming – in BASIC – that punched strip of paper was your record. If you wanted to run the program again you had to rewind it, thread it through a different mechanism between the reels, and let it control the terminal like a player piano roll. Zap zap zap zap zap.
“Player piano” – it’s in the dictionary between “mainframe” and “typewriter.”
There was no monitor. Instead there was a roll of rough yellowish paper, one grade below newsprint, that fed through the top. When you told the terminal to print something, it would just type it out on the paper, one character at a time – clack clack clack clack clack DING clack clack clack clack clack.
Computers were louder back then.
We were supposed to be learning how to program, but we spent most of the time playing the Star Trek game that somebody had coded into the mainframe. You would type in command strings at the prompt, and it would spit back the result of whatever action you just told it to do. When you lost track of where you were, you could tell it to print out a map. This was highly recommended before you tried to warp your way across the galaxy, since the game was remarkably unforgiving about things like trying to rocket your way through a star.
The Klingons would stalk you from sector to sector, and your job was to kill them all. We eventually got good enough at that task that we began seeking other things to do. This is how we discovered that you could, in fact, torpedo a planet. At which point the game would print out a sarcastic little congratulations message – “Planet destroyed. Zero Population Growth thanks you.”
Does Zero Population Growth even exist anymore?
We played that game for two solid years, and by the time I got to high school it had taken the next step in computer technology by graduating from the mainframe to being contained on a cassette tape.
“Cassette tape” is located somewhat earlier in the dictionary than “mainframe.”
The game had pretty much lost its luster for us by then, but we were amused by the fact that you actually could play the cassette tape in an ordinary tape player. It sounded like a symphony of unoiled screen doors.
I’m not sure my daughters believed this story, in their world of iPods and streaming video, but ‘tis true, ‘tis true.
Specifically, we started with a debate regarding how strong of a hold on the back of a car one of those magnetic pictures of a dog’s head could have. We decided after some discussion that “pretty strong” about covered it. The conversation then moved on to the fact that magnets would not harm a car in any notable way, but they would harm a computer. It would wipe your hard drive, but not a CD. Of course, they would be bad for floppy discs, too.
At this point there was a digression while I explained to my daughters what precisely a floppy disc was. Neither of them have ever seen one.
“Except as the Save icon!” Tabitha chimed in. Why it is still used as the Save icon is an interesting question.
I began using computers in the mid-1980s when they still used 3.5” floppy discs, though the discs weren’t at all floppy, being encased in plastic. The older computers that were still in use at the time, though, they had the 5.25” discs that actually were floppy. You could wave them around and they would undulate like seaweed under the ocean.
Lauren’s eyes grew big at the thought.
Then she asked me, “Did computers have monitors back then?”
Yes, I told her. The ones I used did, anyway – little 6” black and white monitors. Though as I came to think about it, that wasn’t always true either.
The first time I ever used a computer was when I was in junior high school, probably in 1979. It was a dumb terminal – a jargon term, not a name given in frustration. For those of you who grew up in the internet age, a dumb terminal was something that had no memory or computing power of its own but was connected to a mainframe computer somewhere else.
You can look up “mainframe” on your own.
It was about the size of a large typewriter, with grey cylindrical keys that made a zapping sound when you pushed them down the entire half inch by which they stuck up above the beige surface of the terminal.
You can look up “typewriter” too, while you’re at it.
Mounted on the right side was a reel-to-reel arrangement that fed an inch-wide strip of pink paper from the back reel through a dot-matrix hole punch and onto the front reel. When you wanted to do any actual programming – in BASIC – that punched strip of paper was your record. If you wanted to run the program again you had to rewind it, thread it through a different mechanism between the reels, and let it control the terminal like a player piano roll. Zap zap zap zap zap.
“Player piano” – it’s in the dictionary between “mainframe” and “typewriter.”
There was no monitor. Instead there was a roll of rough yellowish paper, one grade below newsprint, that fed through the top. When you told the terminal to print something, it would just type it out on the paper, one character at a time – clack clack clack clack clack DING clack clack clack clack clack.
Computers were louder back then.
We were supposed to be learning how to program, but we spent most of the time playing the Star Trek game that somebody had coded into the mainframe. You would type in command strings at the prompt, and it would spit back the result of whatever action you just told it to do. When you lost track of where you were, you could tell it to print out a map. This was highly recommended before you tried to warp your way across the galaxy, since the game was remarkably unforgiving about things like trying to rocket your way through a star.
The Klingons would stalk you from sector to sector, and your job was to kill them all. We eventually got good enough at that task that we began seeking other things to do. This is how we discovered that you could, in fact, torpedo a planet. At which point the game would print out a sarcastic little congratulations message – “Planet destroyed. Zero Population Growth thanks you.”
Does Zero Population Growth even exist anymore?
We played that game for two solid years, and by the time I got to high school it had taken the next step in computer technology by graduating from the mainframe to being contained on a cassette tape.
“Cassette tape” is located somewhat earlier in the dictionary than “mainframe.”
The game had pretty much lost its luster for us by then, but we were amused by the fact that you actually could play the cassette tape in an ordinary tape player. It sounded like a symphony of unoiled screen doors.
I’m not sure my daughters believed this story, in their world of iPods and streaming video, but ‘tis true, ‘tis true.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
On Teabaggers and Slavery
Just when I think that the Teabaggers can’t sink any lower, when I start to believe that maybe their all out war on intelligence and common sense has reached rock bottom and surely, surely they have done about as much harm to the values, traditions and history of America as they are going to do, they find a way to dig deeper. They find new ways to demonstrate that they are idiots of the foulest stripe, brain-dead zealots without any hope of redemption or even ability to recognize themselves for the moral vacuums that they are.
It’s disappointing, really.
You’d like to believe that your fellow citizens are not actively engaged in destroying the nation in order to serve their own selfish ends, but the mountain of evidence to the contrary is getting harder and harder to ignore.
As the latest exhibit in this sorry museum, I give you the Teabaggers of the formerly proud state of Tennessee, who have decided that the fact that many of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders – that slavery even existed during the nation’s formative period – should be removed from the public school textbooks and replaced by a version of American history that can only be described as “whitewashed” no matter how much you want to avoid the pun.
For the moment, let us ignore the fact that these same Teabaggers are doing their best to destroy public education as a whole in this country. Why they would worry about textbooks when their larger aim is to prevent education at all is a bit of a mystery, but there you have it. Perhaps they’re just trying to achieve their goal incrementally.
Be that as it may, the idea that slavery can be excised from American history by the braying of idiots is so fundamentally absurd and so morally leprous that it bears examination.
This nation was founded on a paradox – a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and at the same time one that rested on the backs of an entire population of human chattel.
I’m not even going to go into the economic aspects of slavery other than to point out that the entire economy of the colonies was dependent on it and would be long after independence, through the mid-nineteenth century in fact. The textile factories - and with them the financial system - of the free North depended on the cotton of the slaveholding South, which is one reason the South decided to risk the Civil War. To try to understand the economy of the US between 1675 and 1865 without a thorough background understanding of slavery and its role is an exercise in stupidity and failure.
Nor am I going to spend much time on the social aspects of slavery – the forced importation of hundreds of thousands of Africans into the colonies, the role they played in everyday culture in both North and South, the legacies they gave to American society that have become so ingrained that we no longer even remember where they came from. There were Africans in what would become the United States before there were Pilgrims, and if you don’t think that matters you aren’t paying attention.
For me, though, the more interesting role of slavery has always been the political one. The tension between slavery and freedom defined the political world of the Founding Fathers.
For some of them, that contrast was a painful reminder of what could happen to them and a goad to resist what they saw as the political incursions of the British government in the 1760s and 1770s. They lived in a mental world where power and liberty were ancient and eternal opposites fighting a zero-sum game for the political soul of the nation, and any encroachment upon liberty was a push down the path of slavery – a path whose end result they could easily see, since so many of them owned slaves.
That’s why they fought so hard against what the British government regarded as simple common sense measures designed to pay for the services the colonists used – nobody would have gone broke paying the Stamp Tax and the money it raised was largely designed to stay in the colonies and pay for the soldiers protecting the frontier. The British had moved on to a more modern sense of politics by then and could never understand why the colonists reacted as harshly as they did.
Classical republicanism – the dominant political ideology of the colonies during the Revolutionary Crisis – was a school of thought that lived comfortably with the idea of slavery for some and liberty for others, and the trick was to stay on the right side of the line. It was an ideology of hierarchy, where equality counted only among your peers, and the idea that one group of people could fight for liberty while enslaving others was not necessarily problematic.
It was problematic for other Founders, though.
For them the contrast between slavery and freedom was a needling inconsistency, one that shamed and embarrassed them. The rising tide of Lockean liberalism had a much more expansive definition of liberty and equality, and the contrast of a slaveholding society demanding liberty to avoid being themselves enslaved was simply too glaring to ignore. Ultimately liberalism will triumph in America and spur both democracy and the abolitionist movement, but during the Revolutionary Era it was simply a strong and conflicting counterpoint to the way the first group of Founders thought.
The British, who had moved on to liberalism decades earlier, relished this inconsistency and often took pains to point it out. “How is it,” Samuel Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Don’t think that question didn’t hit home in the colonies.
The struggles between these points of view dominated the Revolutionary Era. They appear in the Declaration of Independence. They appear in the Constitution. They appear in the state constitutions of the day, the newspapers, the letters and diaries, and the plays, novels and songs people found in their everyday life.
To try to excise this in the name of some half-witted modern ideology too uncomfortable with the complexities of reality to bear hearing them or allow their children to hear them is a historical revisionism on par with Stalin’s attempts to fictionalize the story of the Soviet Union.
The United States is better than that, or it should be.
The contrast between slavery and freedom teaches us who we were and who we are. The struggles over slavery defined this nation. The contributions of the enslaved made this nation what it is. We forget this at our peril and we hide it at our loss.
The Teabaggers of Tennessee and the horse they rode in on are hereby cordially invited to find some other use for their time.
It’s disappointing, really.
You’d like to believe that your fellow citizens are not actively engaged in destroying the nation in order to serve their own selfish ends, but the mountain of evidence to the contrary is getting harder and harder to ignore.
As the latest exhibit in this sorry museum, I give you the Teabaggers of the formerly proud state of Tennessee, who have decided that the fact that many of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders – that slavery even existed during the nation’s formative period – should be removed from the public school textbooks and replaced by a version of American history that can only be described as “whitewashed” no matter how much you want to avoid the pun.
For the moment, let us ignore the fact that these same Teabaggers are doing their best to destroy public education as a whole in this country. Why they would worry about textbooks when their larger aim is to prevent education at all is a bit of a mystery, but there you have it. Perhaps they’re just trying to achieve their goal incrementally.
Be that as it may, the idea that slavery can be excised from American history by the braying of idiots is so fundamentally absurd and so morally leprous that it bears examination.
This nation was founded on a paradox – a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and at the same time one that rested on the backs of an entire population of human chattel.
I’m not even going to go into the economic aspects of slavery other than to point out that the entire economy of the colonies was dependent on it and would be long after independence, through the mid-nineteenth century in fact. The textile factories - and with them the financial system - of the free North depended on the cotton of the slaveholding South, which is one reason the South decided to risk the Civil War. To try to understand the economy of the US between 1675 and 1865 without a thorough background understanding of slavery and its role is an exercise in stupidity and failure.
Nor am I going to spend much time on the social aspects of slavery – the forced importation of hundreds of thousands of Africans into the colonies, the role they played in everyday culture in both North and South, the legacies they gave to American society that have become so ingrained that we no longer even remember where they came from. There were Africans in what would become the United States before there were Pilgrims, and if you don’t think that matters you aren’t paying attention.
For me, though, the more interesting role of slavery has always been the political one. The tension between slavery and freedom defined the political world of the Founding Fathers.
For some of them, that contrast was a painful reminder of what could happen to them and a goad to resist what they saw as the political incursions of the British government in the 1760s and 1770s. They lived in a mental world where power and liberty were ancient and eternal opposites fighting a zero-sum game for the political soul of the nation, and any encroachment upon liberty was a push down the path of slavery – a path whose end result they could easily see, since so many of them owned slaves.
That’s why they fought so hard against what the British government regarded as simple common sense measures designed to pay for the services the colonists used – nobody would have gone broke paying the Stamp Tax and the money it raised was largely designed to stay in the colonies and pay for the soldiers protecting the frontier. The British had moved on to a more modern sense of politics by then and could never understand why the colonists reacted as harshly as they did.
Classical republicanism – the dominant political ideology of the colonies during the Revolutionary Crisis – was a school of thought that lived comfortably with the idea of slavery for some and liberty for others, and the trick was to stay on the right side of the line. It was an ideology of hierarchy, where equality counted only among your peers, and the idea that one group of people could fight for liberty while enslaving others was not necessarily problematic.
It was problematic for other Founders, though.
For them the contrast between slavery and freedom was a needling inconsistency, one that shamed and embarrassed them. The rising tide of Lockean liberalism had a much more expansive definition of liberty and equality, and the contrast of a slaveholding society demanding liberty to avoid being themselves enslaved was simply too glaring to ignore. Ultimately liberalism will triumph in America and spur both democracy and the abolitionist movement, but during the Revolutionary Era it was simply a strong and conflicting counterpoint to the way the first group of Founders thought.
The British, who had moved on to liberalism decades earlier, relished this inconsistency and often took pains to point it out. “How is it,” Samuel Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Don’t think that question didn’t hit home in the colonies.
The struggles between these points of view dominated the Revolutionary Era. They appear in the Declaration of Independence. They appear in the Constitution. They appear in the state constitutions of the day, the newspapers, the letters and diaries, and the plays, novels and songs people found in their everyday life.
To try to excise this in the name of some half-witted modern ideology too uncomfortable with the complexities of reality to bear hearing them or allow their children to hear them is a historical revisionism on par with Stalin’s attempts to fictionalize the story of the Soviet Union.
The United States is better than that, or it should be.
The contrast between slavery and freedom teaches us who we were and who we are. The struggles over slavery defined this nation. The contributions of the enslaved made this nation what it is. We forget this at our peril and we hide it at our loss.
The Teabaggers of Tennessee and the horse they rode in on are hereby cordially invited to find some other use for their time.
Monday, January 23, 2012
In Which I Am Told What I Already Knew
I went and got my physical examination today, though I did not get good and drunk the night before so I would look and feel my best when I went in this morning. I was the All-American Kid from Our Little Town, and I was hung down, brung down and all kinds of things, as appropriate.
Three cheers to anyone who gets that reference, by the way.
Our Little Town is going through something of an economic shift. The Great Big Factory closed down a few years ago and remains stubbornly vacant, which didn’t stop Governor Teabagger from putting up a big billboard right in front of it proudly touting his job creation record. I’m still not sure whether that was an oversight on the part of his PR staff or a political commentary on the part of the billboard people, since an empty factory is precisely appropriate for a governor who has presided over 39,000 lost private sector jobs since his budget was approved, at a time when the rest of the nation is actually gaining jobs. Either way, it was funny.
Since then we’ve seen a spate of hospital building. People will always get sick, and under our current “pay-to-play” health care system there is good money in that, so in the last few months we’ve seen a brand new hospital open up and an old hospital get new additions and satellites. It will be interesting to see what this does to the culture of Our Little Town in the long run.
This was my first time at the new hospital.
It is a palace.
You walk in and there is a person there at the front door whose sole job is to tell you whether to turn right or left. Then, having chosen the appropriate direction, you walk down a corridor lined with health care retail outlets (pharmacy, eyeglasses, other things I really don’t want to know about, and so on) to the stairs, which wind along a three-story fountain, the kind you used to have to go to a casino to see.
I prefer not to think about that parallel any further.
I took the stairs rather than the elevator because I am trying to be better about things like diet and exercise. Last year was a lost year for such things, and at my age such years need to be kept to an absolute minimum. So I’m eating better than I did, and I really will start to exercise more one of these days. Really.
Hey – I lost three pounds over the Christmas holidays. I’m doing something right.
I like my new doctor. He’s friendly, professional, and appropriately apologetic about the indignities visited upon middle-aged men during their physicals. Those indignities are a high-class problem to have in this age where health care is considered a privilege, granted, but a problem nonetheless.
So I’m about as healthy as you would expect for a 46-year-old man who spends most of his time in front of a computer or deep in a book. I need to continue eating better, and I should move about more than I do. All of the various blood tests from last month came back as “you’re okay but could do better with better food and more exercise,” which I already knew, and nobody seemed to feel a need for anything drastic. Certain things are better when they're boring - travel, international politics, and health care most notably. So this visit was a success, I think.
And I get to go back and do it again next year, for which I am grateful if not exactly thrilled.
Three cheers to anyone who gets that reference, by the way.
Our Little Town is going through something of an economic shift. The Great Big Factory closed down a few years ago and remains stubbornly vacant, which didn’t stop Governor Teabagger from putting up a big billboard right in front of it proudly touting his job creation record. I’m still not sure whether that was an oversight on the part of his PR staff or a political commentary on the part of the billboard people, since an empty factory is precisely appropriate for a governor who has presided over 39,000 lost private sector jobs since his budget was approved, at a time when the rest of the nation is actually gaining jobs. Either way, it was funny.
Since then we’ve seen a spate of hospital building. People will always get sick, and under our current “pay-to-play” health care system there is good money in that, so in the last few months we’ve seen a brand new hospital open up and an old hospital get new additions and satellites. It will be interesting to see what this does to the culture of Our Little Town in the long run.
This was my first time at the new hospital.
It is a palace.
You walk in and there is a person there at the front door whose sole job is to tell you whether to turn right or left. Then, having chosen the appropriate direction, you walk down a corridor lined with health care retail outlets (pharmacy, eyeglasses, other things I really don’t want to know about, and so on) to the stairs, which wind along a three-story fountain, the kind you used to have to go to a casino to see.
I prefer not to think about that parallel any further.
I took the stairs rather than the elevator because I am trying to be better about things like diet and exercise. Last year was a lost year for such things, and at my age such years need to be kept to an absolute minimum. So I’m eating better than I did, and I really will start to exercise more one of these days. Really.
Hey – I lost three pounds over the Christmas holidays. I’m doing something right.
I like my new doctor. He’s friendly, professional, and appropriately apologetic about the indignities visited upon middle-aged men during their physicals. Those indignities are a high-class problem to have in this age where health care is considered a privilege, granted, but a problem nonetheless.
So I’m about as healthy as you would expect for a 46-year-old man who spends most of his time in front of a computer or deep in a book. I need to continue eating better, and I should move about more than I do. All of the various blood tests from last month came back as “you’re okay but could do better with better food and more exercise,” which I already knew, and nobody seemed to feel a need for anything drastic. Certain things are better when they're boring - travel, international politics, and health care most notably. So this visit was a success, I think.
And I get to go back and do it again next year, for which I am grateful if not exactly thrilled.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Memo from the Live Studio Audience
My children have become addicted to America’s Funniest Home Videos, or AFV to the cognoscenti. I’m not sure where the H went.
On the one hand, the endless litany of pratfalls, Darwin Award entries and psychotic pets, combined with a level of melodramatic overacting on the part of the host that would have seemed excessive in the silent movie era, can be tough to take.
On the other hand, it’s kind of fun to watch, in a guilty sort of way.
Plus, I have scored major Dad points with my offspring because once upon a time I was there, in the audience.
It was my first year of graduate school at Iowa and a bitterly cold winter that kept most of us locked indoors where in theory we were being productive little students but in practice we were mostly bored. My first day of classes that semester it was 24 degrees below zero with a wind chill of 70 below. That’s Fahrenheit. I have no idea what that translates to in centigrade beyond “brass monkey cold.” We were the only institution in the state that was open for business, and I had a mile-long walk to my first class. We didn’t see a temperature with a real square root for over two weeks. We stayed in.
Around this time my friend Bonnie somehow came into the possession of a number of tickets for the satellite studio audience of AFV that was to be held in Cedar Rapids, and a group of us decided that yes, that sounded like a good idea.
I blame the weather.
Dave drove us up there that Saturday morning. Dave was a big, pale guy, quiet and polite, who had an ability to drop offhand bombshells into conversations that I have seldom seen equaled. He was always genuinely surprised at our reactions, too, since to him it was just another observation on par with anything we might say about our last seminar. Thus we discovered that the traffic congestion we encountered getting out of Iowa City wasn’t so bad compared with the traffic in Lagos, Nigeria.
Cedar Rapids on a Saturday morning is a ghost town.
The studio was located on a three-lane one-way street that might as well have been neutron bombed, since there were a great many buildings and parked cars but as far as we could tell nobody living but us. We stood in the street for nearly fifteen minutes at one point just to see if there would be any traffic. For all that happened we could still be standing there.
A door opened and we went inside, and eventually this repeated itself enough to fill the bleachers that had been put up in a large square room.
They had set things up so that we were facing a small stage with a large central monitor placed directly in front of us and a couple of smaller ones off to the side. The smaller ones were for us to see the other satellite audiences like us, and the middle one was so we could see the host, Bob Saget, who was safe and warm in Los Angeles.
Bob has since moved on to greener pastures. And good for him. The new guy these days seems to enjoy himself more than Bob ever did.
They herded us onto the bleachers and then some poor harried associate producer came out to explain to us the ground rules. We were to cheer when asked to cheer. We were to laugh at Bob’s jokes, if possible, or stay quiet if not. And if we could react visibly to the videos there was a better chance that we’d make it onto the broadcast.
And then he threw candy at us.
That turned out to be a running theme, actually. Every time there was a pause in the action, which was surprisingly often, some flunky (the associate producer only took the first round) would come out with a big bag of candy and spray it at us. It was kind of fun, surprisingly enough. Festive.
Eventually the show started.
I really don’t remember the videos. I assume that there were a few cats in need of medication and at least one guy getting whacked in the cojones, and if there were any fewer than half a dozen videos of people falling off of things they shouldn’t have been standing on to begin with, well, that would be a first.
What I do remember is that it usually took Bob two takes to get his introductions down the way they wanted him to, and that during the breaks in between takes – we could still see and hear him – he would spend his time telling fart jokes.
When the videos were over and the candy bag was empty, they sent us out into the deserted streets of Cedar Rapids, which were ever so much less problematic that way than the streets of Lagos. We ended up finding dinner on the way home – a buffet, as I recall, one that probably regretted letting in a crowd of hungry graduate students who descended like locusts on their neatly arranged food and left nothing but one empty spinning plate on the floor, but so it goes.
I am an AFV veteran.
On the one hand, the endless litany of pratfalls, Darwin Award entries and psychotic pets, combined with a level of melodramatic overacting on the part of the host that would have seemed excessive in the silent movie era, can be tough to take.
On the other hand, it’s kind of fun to watch, in a guilty sort of way.
Plus, I have scored major Dad points with my offspring because once upon a time I was there, in the audience.
It was my first year of graduate school at Iowa and a bitterly cold winter that kept most of us locked indoors where in theory we were being productive little students but in practice we were mostly bored. My first day of classes that semester it was 24 degrees below zero with a wind chill of 70 below. That’s Fahrenheit. I have no idea what that translates to in centigrade beyond “brass monkey cold.” We were the only institution in the state that was open for business, and I had a mile-long walk to my first class. We didn’t see a temperature with a real square root for over two weeks. We stayed in.
Around this time my friend Bonnie somehow came into the possession of a number of tickets for the satellite studio audience of AFV that was to be held in Cedar Rapids, and a group of us decided that yes, that sounded like a good idea.
I blame the weather.
Dave drove us up there that Saturday morning. Dave was a big, pale guy, quiet and polite, who had an ability to drop offhand bombshells into conversations that I have seldom seen equaled. He was always genuinely surprised at our reactions, too, since to him it was just another observation on par with anything we might say about our last seminar. Thus we discovered that the traffic congestion we encountered getting out of Iowa City wasn’t so bad compared with the traffic in Lagos, Nigeria.
Cedar Rapids on a Saturday morning is a ghost town.
The studio was located on a three-lane one-way street that might as well have been neutron bombed, since there were a great many buildings and parked cars but as far as we could tell nobody living but us. We stood in the street for nearly fifteen minutes at one point just to see if there would be any traffic. For all that happened we could still be standing there.
A door opened and we went inside, and eventually this repeated itself enough to fill the bleachers that had been put up in a large square room.
They had set things up so that we were facing a small stage with a large central monitor placed directly in front of us and a couple of smaller ones off to the side. The smaller ones were for us to see the other satellite audiences like us, and the middle one was so we could see the host, Bob Saget, who was safe and warm in Los Angeles.
Bob has since moved on to greener pastures. And good for him. The new guy these days seems to enjoy himself more than Bob ever did.
They herded us onto the bleachers and then some poor harried associate producer came out to explain to us the ground rules. We were to cheer when asked to cheer. We were to laugh at Bob’s jokes, if possible, or stay quiet if not. And if we could react visibly to the videos there was a better chance that we’d make it onto the broadcast.
And then he threw candy at us.
That turned out to be a running theme, actually. Every time there was a pause in the action, which was surprisingly often, some flunky (the associate producer only took the first round) would come out with a big bag of candy and spray it at us. It was kind of fun, surprisingly enough. Festive.
Eventually the show started.
I really don’t remember the videos. I assume that there were a few cats in need of medication and at least one guy getting whacked in the cojones, and if there were any fewer than half a dozen videos of people falling off of things they shouldn’t have been standing on to begin with, well, that would be a first.
What I do remember is that it usually took Bob two takes to get his introductions down the way they wanted him to, and that during the breaks in between takes – we could still see and hear him – he would spend his time telling fart jokes.
When the videos were over and the candy bag was empty, they sent us out into the deserted streets of Cedar Rapids, which were ever so much less problematic that way than the streets of Lagos. We ended up finding dinner on the way home – a buffet, as I recall, one that probably regretted letting in a crowd of hungry graduate students who descended like locusts on their neatly arranged food and left nothing but one empty spinning plate on the floor, but so it goes.
I am an AFV veteran.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Reflections on a Gradebook
I spent most of today running errands.
First there was a visit to the dentist, which is something I generally put off for as long as possible and then some. I really hate the whole process – and, in fairness, since I don’t do well with people sticking things in my mouth, most dentists aren’t all that keen to see me either – but I’m old enough now to know that I’m better off for going, so I go. Eventually.
Then there were other errands – a trip to the hardware store, another to the grocery, and finally one to the office supply store so I could replace the gradebook I’ve been using for the last few years. It’s full now – a good sign of employment in these parlous times – and I needed a new one. Eventually, after searching through aisles and aisles of office supplies I found what I was looking for. Same brand. Same style. Even the same color.
But with one key difference.
The old gradebook could accommodate thirty-five students per page. The new one has slots for fifty.
This bothers me, and for more than just the fact that I now have to cram everything into 30% less space and my eyes are not as sharp as they once were. It bothers me because there’s no real savings to the manufacturer to make that change – it probably cost them more in ink, as a matter of fact.
What it says to me is that the general trend in this country over the last decade or so of slashing education in order to fund tax breaks for the already wealthy – of shortchanging our future in order to plunder the present for the benefit of the few – the natural result of which has been ever-larger classes and ever-smaller educational results, that trend has now become institutionalized in the very products people make to service the educational market.
It’s like when major cereal manufacturers began listing nutritional information in Spanish on the boxes – money talks and zealotry walks, and the whole “English-only” movement died an unmourned death at the hands of Spanish-speaking consumers. When the products you buy conform to the new reality, the new reality is here to stay.
The new reality is bigger classes, fewer dollars for education, and shrinking prospects for the American future.
Not coincidentally, today is the day that recall signatures come in for Governor Teabagger and his cronies, who have slashed over a billion dollars out of Wisconsin's educational system in order to give that money to their wealthy puppetmasters. Having epitomized the crass power-grabbing, money-grubbing, anti-American agenda of the extreme right wing, having assaulted the rights of ordinary American citizens to vote, speak, assemble, and control their own lives, now the reckoning is starting to come due.
Apparently over one million people signed the recall petitions for Governor Teabagger – about double the minimum requirement and as a percentage of the electorate more signatures than any recall in American history. His lead minion in the legislature has also been recalled, with 25% more signatures than required. Indeed, quite a few of Governor Teabaggers cronies, minions and lackeys have been recalled.
Remember how they said they’d be recalling the Democrats too? Not one. Not even a serious attempt at one.
So it’s a historic day here in Wisconsin. I have little doubt that Governor Teabagger and his cronies, minions and lackeys will continue to rig the game, play with the rules, and – as a last resort – blatantly steal the election if they have to. They’ve already done that, so doing it again won’t seem so hard for them.
But perhaps they will fail this time.
In the meantime, school budgets get smaller, class sizes get bigger, and manufacturers adjust their products to fit the new reality.
First there was a visit to the dentist, which is something I generally put off for as long as possible and then some. I really hate the whole process – and, in fairness, since I don’t do well with people sticking things in my mouth, most dentists aren’t all that keen to see me either – but I’m old enough now to know that I’m better off for going, so I go. Eventually.
Then there were other errands – a trip to the hardware store, another to the grocery, and finally one to the office supply store so I could replace the gradebook I’ve been using for the last few years. It’s full now – a good sign of employment in these parlous times – and I needed a new one. Eventually, after searching through aisles and aisles of office supplies I found what I was looking for. Same brand. Same style. Even the same color.
But with one key difference.
The old gradebook could accommodate thirty-five students per page. The new one has slots for fifty.
This bothers me, and for more than just the fact that I now have to cram everything into 30% less space and my eyes are not as sharp as they once were. It bothers me because there’s no real savings to the manufacturer to make that change – it probably cost them more in ink, as a matter of fact.
What it says to me is that the general trend in this country over the last decade or so of slashing education in order to fund tax breaks for the already wealthy – of shortchanging our future in order to plunder the present for the benefit of the few – the natural result of which has been ever-larger classes and ever-smaller educational results, that trend has now become institutionalized in the very products people make to service the educational market.
It’s like when major cereal manufacturers began listing nutritional information in Spanish on the boxes – money talks and zealotry walks, and the whole “English-only” movement died an unmourned death at the hands of Spanish-speaking consumers. When the products you buy conform to the new reality, the new reality is here to stay.
The new reality is bigger classes, fewer dollars for education, and shrinking prospects for the American future.
Not coincidentally, today is the day that recall signatures come in for Governor Teabagger and his cronies, who have slashed over a billion dollars out of Wisconsin's educational system in order to give that money to their wealthy puppetmasters. Having epitomized the crass power-grabbing, money-grubbing, anti-American agenda of the extreme right wing, having assaulted the rights of ordinary American citizens to vote, speak, assemble, and control their own lives, now the reckoning is starting to come due.
Apparently over one million people signed the recall petitions for Governor Teabagger – about double the minimum requirement and as a percentage of the electorate more signatures than any recall in American history. His lead minion in the legislature has also been recalled, with 25% more signatures than required. Indeed, quite a few of Governor Teabaggers cronies, minions and lackeys have been recalled.
Remember how they said they’d be recalling the Democrats too? Not one. Not even a serious attempt at one.
So it’s a historic day here in Wisconsin. I have little doubt that Governor Teabagger and his cronies, minions and lackeys will continue to rig the game, play with the rules, and – as a last resort – blatantly steal the election if they have to. They’ve already done that, so doing it again won’t seem so hard for them.
But perhaps they will fail this time.
In the meantime, school budgets get smaller, class sizes get bigger, and manufacturers adjust their products to fit the new reality.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Kickin' It Old School on the Slopes
I took the girls to Mel Allen Hill (“Ooooh! That’s gotta hurt!”) this weekend, so they could try out their new sleds.
They are snazzy sleds – bright red surfboards made of some kind of indestructible foam that will likely remain inviolate in a landfill until the sun goes supernova and life on earth no longer has to worry about recycling, and coated with a slick sort of plastic on the bottom that in theory provides a zero-friction surface for you to skim across the snow.
If there is any snow.
We got our first measurable snowfall of the season last week here in Baja Canada – seven inches of fluffy powder – and the pent-up demand for winter sports unleashed itself all over Mel Allen Hill with a white-hot fury, such that by the time Tabitha, Grace and I arrived on Saturday the snow on the top five feet of the hill had been worn down to the grass. When Lauren and I got there on Sunday it was the top fifteen feet and we had to move over to a different area of the hill. Not that this stopped anyone.
As an adult, mostly your job is to stand around at the top of the hill and give pushes to recalcitrant sleds (or, on the other side, put your foot down on overeager sleds so that children actually have a chance to climb on before they go skittering down the hill). It does leave a fair amount of time for conversation and observation.
Ooooh! That’s gotta hurt!
I ended up talking with one particular dad for a while. I never did find out his name, though I now know where he works, where he went to graduate school (same place I did, and at the same time), and a host of other details. Somehow the name never came up. It’s a guy thing.
What started our conversation was the fact that his son had an actual sled. Not a foam surfboard. Not an inflatable life raft. Not a snowboard. A sled, with wooden slats, metal runners and a rudimentary steering mechanism that provides just enough of the illusion of control that you can get yourself into genuinely disastrous situations with confidence and pride.
A real sled, like the ones of my youth.
When I was a kid the neighborhood gang used to drag those sleds about half a mile or so to the park, where we would stare down the enticingly named “Suicide Hill.”
Suicide Hill descended steeply for about forty yards or so before flattening out and then sending you flying across the gap between the two concrete shuffleboard courts that ran perpendicular to your route like a ramp. Once you landed you had about 15 feet where you could either stop or make a hard right turn – continuing in a straight line or turning left dumped you into the creek.
Good times.
You had to know how to make those sleds do what you wanted them to do, or at least think you could. A foam surfboard or inflatable life raft would probably not have worked very well.
The kid yesterday didn’t know how to operate that sled. We oldsters had to show him where to slot the rope so it wouldn’t interfere with the runners, how to use the steering, even how to brake with his toes off the back end. I’ll bet he didn’t even have the runners waxed.
Kids these days.
They are snazzy sleds – bright red surfboards made of some kind of indestructible foam that will likely remain inviolate in a landfill until the sun goes supernova and life on earth no longer has to worry about recycling, and coated with a slick sort of plastic on the bottom that in theory provides a zero-friction surface for you to skim across the snow.
If there is any snow.
We got our first measurable snowfall of the season last week here in Baja Canada – seven inches of fluffy powder – and the pent-up demand for winter sports unleashed itself all over Mel Allen Hill with a white-hot fury, such that by the time Tabitha, Grace and I arrived on Saturday the snow on the top five feet of the hill had been worn down to the grass. When Lauren and I got there on Sunday it was the top fifteen feet and we had to move over to a different area of the hill. Not that this stopped anyone.
As an adult, mostly your job is to stand around at the top of the hill and give pushes to recalcitrant sleds (or, on the other side, put your foot down on overeager sleds so that children actually have a chance to climb on before they go skittering down the hill). It does leave a fair amount of time for conversation and observation.
Ooooh! That’s gotta hurt!
I ended up talking with one particular dad for a while. I never did find out his name, though I now know where he works, where he went to graduate school (same place I did, and at the same time), and a host of other details. Somehow the name never came up. It’s a guy thing.
What started our conversation was the fact that his son had an actual sled. Not a foam surfboard. Not an inflatable life raft. Not a snowboard. A sled, with wooden slats, metal runners and a rudimentary steering mechanism that provides just enough of the illusion of control that you can get yourself into genuinely disastrous situations with confidence and pride.
A real sled, like the ones of my youth.
When I was a kid the neighborhood gang used to drag those sleds about half a mile or so to the park, where we would stare down the enticingly named “Suicide Hill.”
Suicide Hill descended steeply for about forty yards or so before flattening out and then sending you flying across the gap between the two concrete shuffleboard courts that ran perpendicular to your route like a ramp. Once you landed you had about 15 feet where you could either stop or make a hard right turn – continuing in a straight line or turning left dumped you into the creek.
Good times.
You had to know how to make those sleds do what you wanted them to do, or at least think you could. A foam surfboard or inflatable life raft would probably not have worked very well.
The kid yesterday didn’t know how to operate that sled. We oldsters had to show him where to slot the rope so it wouldn’t interfere with the runners, how to use the steering, even how to brake with his toes off the back end. I’ll bet he didn’t even have the runners waxed.
Kids these days.
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