News and Updates

1. It snowed all day today. It’s still snowing. Everything was canceled and I stayed home with my tea and Kim and Oliver and it was in fact a good day. There was too much grading, and if Webex ever functions correctly on the first try it will surprise me no end, but even so – a good day.

2. People who don’t understand clearing 6 inches (15cm) of snow before the storm is finished have never cleared 12 inches (30cm) of snow after the storm is finished.

3. This was a most welcome break in a week that felt like I was swimming through syrup for most of it. I’m not sure how value-added I was at work, but I did give it my best and that has to count for something.

4. If you want trivia, go to the source. On Saturday I joined my usual team for the Local Businessman High School trivia fundraiser event – the first one I’ve attended since 2020, just weeks before the world caught fire – and we won handily over 27 other teams. This is what happens when you have a crew that includes at least three teachers and two librarians on it, plus three others who do this sort of thing regularly.

5. We also went up to join Lauren and Maxim for their regular Monday night trivia game. They named the team “The Eagles Were Robbed,” which I appreciated. We had Kim, Oliver, Chase, Daniel, Isaac, Isaac’s dad, and Isaac’s coworker who told me her name and was a perfectly lovely person to talk with but that information is now lost along with so, so much else, and again we won handily, this time over 14 other teams. We are the greatest of the least! Rah, us!

6. I’m not sure why fans of teams who watched the Super Bowl from their living rooms are still getting after the Eagles for coming within two minutes and a questionable call of possibly winning the game, but you know. Folks. Whatever gets you through the long cold off season, I guess.

7. We have a pile of snack food left over from that game. I suppose we’re all just getting older and less interested in junk, which is good. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have a pile of snack food left over from that game. We’ll work on it, and eventually whatever we don’t get to will go to the chickens and get converted into eggs, and thus the circle of life is unbroken.

8. I keep thinking I’ll make some comment on the current headlines – any of them, all of them – but every time I do it just devolves into vitriol and snark and frankly I don’t need that right now. Just take it as read.

9. There is a lull in my Committee’s work right now so I’m trying to make appearances at events for the other similar Committees down at Home Campus, on the theory that a) they might do so for ours, and b) sometimes you just need people to paper the house. I have a warm body still drawing breath. I can do that.

10. We covered the 19th-century industrial working class yesterday in my remote course, and it always seems to come as a surprise to students what the actual conditions of life were for them. We take so much for granted these days, despite the feverish activity of those who would return us to that state.

Thoughts on the Super Bowl

It seems to be Philadelphia’s time to be in second place in the sports world.

The Phillies made it to the World Series last fall and didn’t win. They gave it a good shot against a heavily favored team that was probably not cheating this time, but it didn’t work out for them.

The Union lost the Major League Soccer championship game the same day that the Phillies lost the Series. On penalty shots, which is just the worst way to decide anything sports related. Play until someone scores, for crying out loud. Even the NHL, which has instituted penalty shot finales for regular season ties, knows to let them play to the end once the regular season is over.

And last night the Eagles lost in the Super Bowl.

We had a good crowd here to see it – me, Kim, and Oliver representing the people currently living here; Lauren, Maxim, Isaac, and Chase coming back from Main Campus University to join us. There was a pile of food that was moderately nonlethal in small amounts and tasty in any quantity. We’d signed up for a temporary account with the broadcaster so we could actually watch the game. We were set for a festive evening.

It was, it has to be said, a great game – pretty much exactly the game you would want in a meeting between the two best teams in the sport. There was a lot of offense. Surprisingly little defense. A few big plays, most of which went against the Birds, unfortunately. And with two minutes to go the score was tied.

That’s when the referees took over.

You can’t call a ticky-tack penalty – a borderline holding penalty on an uncatchable pass – to decide a championship after a game like that. You just can’t. It cheapened the whole thing and rendered the rest of the game irrelevant.

Without that penalty the Eagles get the ball back down three with a minute and a half to go and two time outs, and then we find out who really wins this game.

For all I know it still would have been the Chiefs. The Eagles owned the first half by a wide margin but the Chiefs owned the second half and by that point everyone was tired. It’s possible that Eagles might still have pulled it out. The odds were against them, but the odds have been against the Eagles from the moment they were founded and it’s not like the Kansas City defense had been all that stellar either. It was an offense-heavy game. It would have gone to the last play, no doubt.

I have no idea who would have won. But it would have been decided by the players and not the refs, and that has to count for something.

Bad calls are part of the game, though, and that’s just how it goes.

I will be glad that the Eagles made it that far, that they put up a hell of a fight, that they nearly won anyway, that they look like they’ll be good for a while and fun to watch.

It was a good year for them.

It’s been a good year to be a Philadelphia sports fan in general.

Fly, Eagles, fly.

Joyous Photos

For the last week or so I ended up playing along with another one of those Facebook memes that still come down the pike now and then, and it was a good time. That’s why those memes were popular in the first place, before they became data mining exercises. At this point I figure my data has been mined, so I might as well have a bit of fun.

The meme asks people to post ten photographs that bring you joy, on the theory that we could all use a bit of joy these days. My friend Jenny tagged me for it, which was nice of her. You’re supposed to tag someone else each time you post a photo though I tend not to do that. I offered to tag people if they wanted me to do so instead, and one friend took me up on that. So I have done my bit to spread the meme.

You’re also not supposed to explain the photos – just post them and let people make of them what they will. I did that on Facebook, but the whole point of photos is that they tell stores so I figured I’d expand on that here. It’s my blog, after all.

I’d done a similar sort of challenge a few years ago, so the one limiting criteria I imposed on myself was that I wouldn’t choose any photo older than 2018. I’m not sure why I chose that particular date, but it seemed logical at the time and it cut down on the searching through old photos, the repetition of posting, and the generally overwhelming amount of options that I might have otherwise had. There is a certain freedom in limits that often gets overlooked by the “you can’t tell me what to do” crowd until they grow up a bit, after all.

There were certain themes that emerged from these photographs.

For one thing, they were of people. Every single one of them. For all that I enjoy material things when I have them, the fact is that what brings me joy are the people in my life. All of these pictures are family and friends. Even so, a lot of people whose presence in my life objectively brings me joy don’t appear here. What can I say? I’m a fortunate soul to have so many friends and family to choose from that I can’t fit them all into a meme.

For another, a surprising number of these photos involve those people sitting around a meal, even if that meal is not visible in the photo.

Joy is a matter of good food and good people, I suppose.

Many of these have already appeared in other posts here, but that’s just how things go. Here they are again, in the order in which they appeared in the meme.

This is quite possibly my favorite photograph from when Kim and I went to Italy last year. We were at the Vatican Museum – perhaps the most overwhelming collection of art and artifacts on earth – and I just love how the statue is peering over us. This was our much delayed 25th anniversary trip, a visit to one of the countries of my ancestry and a celebration of a life spent together, and we had a lovely time of it. Someday we’ll go back.

This one is of Oliver and my mom at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, a few months before my mom passed away. We wanted to get her out of the house a bit and she always liked Longwood Gardens. Kim discovered that they will lend you a wheelchair if you need one, so off we went. Oliver did a lot of the pushing, and it was nice to see them together like that. It’s a peaceful photo of a quiet moment.

This was Father’s Day last year. What can I say? I love my kids. And I’m always happy that they want to spend time with me.

I cheated a bit and posted two photos for this one, but they do have a theme. Both Lauren and Oliver graduated from their schools in the last couple of years – Lauren from Local Businessman High School in 2021 and Oliver from Small Liberal Arts College last year – and I am immensely proud of them, for this and for other reasons. They did well in those schools, they made friends, they learned more than just what was taught in their classes, and I got to share some of it with them along the way.

This is the most recent version of The Stair Picture, taken at my aunt and uncle’s house in 2019, just before the pandemic hit. It’s all of the first cousins (we’re not a big group) from youngest to oldest. We’ve been taking this picture since 1983, all of us lined up on one staircase or another in that order and more or less that pose. One of the things I have always been grateful for is that my family all gets along with each other and enjoys spending time together, and the continuity of that is found in this, the latest of a long series of Stair Pictures.

This was another slight bending of the rules, but again – my posts, so there you go. I never really thought I’d leave Philadelphia growing up, let alone have friends to visit in many different countries. In 2018 we went to Europe to see as many of them as we could. We couldn’t see them all, which is a high class problem to have, but there will be future visits. Our first stop was to see Fran – who lived with us as an exchange student and is now family – and her family in Belgium. These are her parents, Roeland and Veerle, and we’re at the B&B where we stayed, not far from their house. We’re still hoping to have them visit us, and perhaps now that the pandemic has become endemic we might make that happen. From there we went to our friends in Sweden. This is on Oja, a small island not that far from Stockholm, and we’re sharing a meal and a conversation. If you start at the bottom right and go clockwise there’s Lauren, Maria, Oliver, Kim, Sara, Helena, and Mats. We’ve been trading visits since before the kids were born – Kim met Mats when he was an exchange student at her high school back in the early 80s – and they were here last year. The last picture is in England – Cornwall, more accurately – not long after we made it out of an escape room there. Lauren is in front, and from left to right standing are Richard, Magnus, Ginny, Kim, Oliver, and me. Richard married Julia, one of my closest friends from high school, and we’ve been visiting ever since. Julia has passed away now, but we’re still here.

This is the Squad as they were in 2018. It’s Friendsgiving and they’ve all brought dishes to share. We made a turkey. I cannot tell you how much I love the fact that Lauren’s friends come over and hang out here with us. They’re lovely people and good to talk with, and most of them don’t bother knocking anymore because why would they? They know they’re welcome here.

This was this past summer, when my brother Keith and my niece Sara came out for a visit. Kim’s parents came down and we fired up the grill and had a grand time together. We enjoyed running around southern Wisconsin as well while they were here. There is a reason my brother was the best man at my wedding, after all. We are brothers in every sense of the word.

This was us over Christmas break. We decided that we’d just have brunch one day, and why not bring out the good china in the process? There’s no point in saving it – the special times are right here with the people you love. We had bacon and eggs and conversation and it was a good day, just the four of us.

There was also a meal in this picture even if you can’t see it. It was Thanksgiving last year and we were at Rory and Amy’s house, surrounded by relatives of many degrees and more good food than we could possibly eat. The glitter is courtesy of one of our nieces. It was a moment, and those you have to savor.

They were all moments like that when you get down to it, and one of the tricks in life is recognizing them when you’re still in the middle of them. Sometimes I succeed.

News and Updates

1. Suddenly – BOOM! – winter. After a disturbingly mild January here in Baja Canada we now have eight inches (18cm or so) of snow on the ground, for long stretches the air temperature has not had a real square root even if you measure in Fahrenheit, and I have been forced to locate my boots. I am perfectly okay with this. You can always add clothing but the reverse is not necessarily true, particularly in the United States. I’ll take this over August any day.

2. I had my somewhat-longer-than-annual physical this week and was pleasantly surprised to discover that modern medicine has determined that The Glove is not terribly effective at maintaining the health of men my age. It was perhaps the least intrusive physical I have ever had, and I for one am all for it. I have a new doctor now since the old one retired, and at the end he asked if I wanted to tell him what he was going to tell me. “Sure,” I said. “Eat less. Move more. See you in a year.” And he just nodded.

3. Somehow I have ended up on a Committee down at Home Campus. I have studiously avoided such things in my time there, but eventually one’s ability to hide in plain sight comes to an end and suddenly there I am, exposed and nominated. I have no idea how one is supposed to accomplish the mission this Committee is tasked with completing, but I suppose I will find out. And then perhaps I will avoid further such entanglements for another 27 years, by which time I will be long past caring.

4. My remote US2 class has started up as well, but at least that’s fun. We went over the general course outline and I noted that we would be covering political issues, economic developments, cultural conflicts, social and demographic changes, and – because this is an actual history class and not an ideological exercise in coddling the comfortable – issues of race, because if you leave race out of American history what you get is propaganda, not history. This of course makes the class illegal in the state of Florida so I did feel obligated to ask my students not to log in if they go down there for spring break, as I don’t need that kind of aggravation.

5. No wonder Florida Man is the national punchline.

6. I try to pay attention to the news but it’s hard when half of Congress has been taken over by howler monkeys scratching their collective ass and shrieking at the moon. So far all they’ve done is launch conspiracy-addled investigations and set the stage for a global financial meltdown. Honestly, isn’t there anyone in the GOP – anyone at all – who understands what a debt ceiling is and why defaulting on the national debt is both unconstitutional and spectacularly stupid? Anyone? Hello? Is this thing on? Hello? I don’t think there’s anybody back there.

7. I cleared off my desk at home and found a wealth of pens. I don't know where they come from, but as an academic I’m used to these office supply manifestations. I think they breed back there, behind the computer. As long as they’re not scaring the horses, I suppose.

8. I am not sure why the Dallas Cowboys fan decided to come at me about my Eagles sweatshirt the other day but I asked how he thought they liked watching the most recent playoff game on their respective televisions and that seemed to suffice. Seriously, folks. I get that some people don’t like my team – lots of people don’t like the Eagles; we don’t care – but you can’t argue that your favorite team is better if mine is still playing and yours isn’t.

9. If all goes well, I there is a possibility that I may be teaching a class this fall that I haven’t taught in a while. It’s a class I’ve always enjoyed and I’d actually be in a classroom rather than online so I’m looking forward to it. There will be paperwork to get there, though.

10. Kyiv still stands, a thumb in the eye to Vladimir Putin and dictators everywhere. It’s been almost a year, and Kyiv still stands.

On the Road to Victory

So the Eagles are going to the Super Bowl, for the second time in the last five years. They won it back in 2018, a hard fought victory over the soulless machine that was the New England Patriots back then. Nobody outside of New England wanted the Patriots to win so I got a lot of support as I wandered around southern Wisconsin in my Eagles gear in the days leading up to the game. It was nice. I can’t say I’m used to that as an Eagles fan.

The Eagles were underdogs then. This year, though, they’ve been the top team in the NFL since opening day and have never relinquished that rank. They finished tied for the best record in the league and have won two playoff games by a combined score of 69 to 14. They will sneak up on nobody.

Though I have to admit I got a bit annoyed at the media coverage of the game prior to kickoff, since it was entirely centered on the opposing quarterback – an interesting story to be sure, but after a while you start to wonder who he’s going to play against. That part got left out more than you’d think. I’m sure he didn’t forget – athletes get paid to remember such things – but if all you had was the pregame reporting you might be forgiven for thinking he was out there by himself.

Every year I pay less and less attention to the NFL and more and more attention to other sports – hockey, soccer, and so on – but what can I say? When my hometown team is doing well, I’ll cheer them on. I’ve been cheering for this team since the Nixon administration, back when they would routinely take two or three years to accumulate double-digit wins. I don’t think it counts as bandwagoning under these circumstances.

I didn’t get to see them win today. We don’t get that channel among the various streaming services that we’ve somehow ended up subscribing to these days, although it’s possible that I might be wrong about that. We’ll check before the Super Bowl. I did follow the game online, though.

Can I just take a moment to point out the utter futility of the City of Philadelphia greasing the light poles? What did they think that would accomplish? Seriously. All that happened is that the people at the top of the poles are greasy now. I hope they save themselves the trouble in February. Win, lose, or draw, there will be people at the top of those poles at the end of the game.

It’s an odd feeling not having my dad around to talk about this. He was a huge Eagles fan, and I get it from him. We'd talk about the Birds a lot in our weekly calls. He’s been gone since before the last time they won it all, though. My brother and I did share a few texts after the game, and that was nice. New traditions and all that.

So now there is the interminable two-week Hype Delay before they actually get to play. There will be all sorts of storylines manufactured – they’re playing the Chiefs, who are coached by their old coach and who have been the league’s elite team for most of the five years since the Eagles won it all, so there's a lot of storylines to choose from – and the Sports Knobs will have their usual field day. And then there will be the game, and somebody has to win so Why Can’t Us?

Why can’t us, indeed.

Fly, Eagles, Fly.

Bot Bot Goose

It’s been two days since the last time I had to block a bot account on Snapchat. That makes it the longest such stretch since Christmas.

For a while there, I was getting between twenty and thirty bots a day asking me to put them on my friend list. You can tell the bots from the people fairly easily – they’ve always got a vaguely exotic female name fronting an actual username that includes numbers and multiple uses of the letter X.

I’m closing in on retirement and have been married for over a quarter of a century. I think they’ve misjudged their target, to be honest.

I have no idea why I became such a target for these bots in the last month. It wasn’t that way before Christmas. I don’t even use the app very often – it’s something I installed specifically to communicate with my family since they like using it – so it’s not like I’ve been leaving little digital trails all over the web from posting Snaps or searching for things with the app. I understand that this is just one of those things that goes around on Snapchat, though, and perhaps it was just my turn.

I report them as spam and then block them. It's the digital version of Whack-a-Mole.

Eventually I got tired of that and looked up ways to get them to stop, most of which fell into the “Here’s a set of instructions that don’t actually apply to you because when you go into Settings you don’t actually have that setting and therefore can’t change it” category.

I’m not sure why apps do that.

For a long time I tried to get Instagram – an app I have mostly to find funny memes and vintage photographs, though I do have friends and family there and someday I promise I will actually post something, but for those of you waiting for that to happen my advice is not to hold your breath – to do something I wanted it to do and none of the various settings I was supposed to change actually existed on my account as far as I could tell. I’m not sure what I ended up doing, honestly – large parts of last fall are kind of a blur now – but eventually it went back to showing me funny memes so I’m happy again.

I’m just going to file my recent Snapchat experience under the general heading of “Can’t Have Nice Things Anymore” and leave it there.

I don’t answer my phone unless I recognize the number calling me, since 98% of unrecognized numbers are spam, scams, or telemarketers – three categories that overlap considerably. Phone calls used to be fun. I’m old enough to remember when it was vaguely exciting when the phone rang, because it could be a friend or at least someone actually looking for you specifically instead of a random mark to roll for nickels.

Half the email I receive I delete unread because it either falls into one of the above categories or it is from an actual person or organization I know but has nothing whatsoever to do with me or any of my concerns. At the moment I have six different email addresses – seven if you count the defunct work email that is still forwarding messages to my current main work email four years later – and a once-useful service is now mostly a way for time vampires to try to suck minutes from your life without giving you anything in return, not even eternal undead life.

Too many websites exist solely to put cookies on my browser and sell my contact information to other websites so they can put cookies on my browser and sell my contact information to still other websites. Surely I have accepted all the cookies by now? There can’t be more out there. Maybe?

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with Snapchat. It does serve the purpose I installed it to serve, though, so if the bots die down a bit I suppose I’ll keep it.

Our Trip to Puerto Rico - We Dine

My favorite things to do when we travel are wander about in cities and find good food to eat. What can I say? I am a simple man.

The first order of business when I woke up on our first morning there was to go to the nearest grocery store and stock up on breakfast and snacks. We knew we’d be eating lunches and dinners out, but first thing in the morning it’s good to be where you are and nibble. Fortunately the apartment came with a binder full of recommendations for all sorts of things, including the grocery store. I took a picture of the directions, walked out to the street, and confidently set off in exactly the wrong direction.

There was a time when I had a good sense of direction and mostly I still have it, but too many times recently I have found myself totally turned around in places where it should have been a lot clearer to me. Eventually I did get the hang of Old San Juan and could navigate comfortably around the neighborhood, but that first morning I ended up at the fort and that was just entirely the opposite way from where I wanted to go.

It was nice to see the fort, though.

After getting back on track I did find the grocery store. I love grocery stores. It’s endlessly fascinating to see the sorts of foods that people find normal, since they’re always different from the things I find in my own grocery store. I found cheese and sausages in new varieties, and crackers to put them on. There was milk and orange juice. Cereal. A few other things, all which I then had to schlep back to the apartment which was further away than I remembered it being and uphill.

After breakfast we decided to go to the fort and, well, I already knew the way there so I suppose the morning’s adventures weren’t totally wasted. We cut through the Plaza de San Jose, turned left, and found the water ice guy.

You can’t beat good water ice on a hot day and as far as I was concerned every day in San Juan was hot, so we got in line. It was far too sweet, but tasty.

For dinner that night Kim wanted to try mofongo, which is a Puerto Rican specialty involving plantains and pork. Fortunately in my travels that morning I had passed by a place next door to the grocery store that had the word Mofongo right there in its name so we went to try it.

The rest of us ended up getting other things, but Kim said the mofongo was good. At least that was what she ordered. Most of the rest of our food wasn’t quite what we asked for, but you had to admit it was good food nonetheless.

The best place we found in Old San Juan – the only place we went to twice – was a tiny little hole in the wall bar that was proudly local and served drinks and empanadas. It was, not surprisingly, called Birra & Empanadas, and I can highly recommend it to anyone heading down to San Juan. We stumbled across it by accident on our second night there – it was maybe half a block from another place that had gotten good reviews and had the line of customers outside to prove it, a line that was moving slowly enough that if we had hadn’t left we’d still be in it even now and we were hungry enough to move on. We were there for a very late lunch after not eating much at the beach, and we ended up going back there for dinner for our last night in San Juan as well. I liked this place better than the one out by Yunque, though Kim feels differently about that. They were both wonderful.

“Birra” means “beer” in Italian. It doesn’t usually mean that in Spanish – “cerveza” is the more standard word – but apparently it can.

The entire place was maybe the size of your living room. It had two entrances that were about eight feet apart, though there was no interior partition. The right entrance opened onto a crowded bar, while the left entrance led to three or four small tables tucked along the wall. There was a table on the wall between the entrances too. As noted, their entire menu (nowhere written down) consisted of drinks and empanadas, as well as a wide variety of squeeze bottles full of different hot sauces that people passed around from table to table. It was a friendly place and the empanadas were inexpensive, hot, stuffed full, and tasty, and really what else do you want from a place to eat? You order the empanadas by the kind of filling and they keep bringing them out as they were ready, and sometimes you get a plate and sometimes you just put them on a napkin, and it was glorious. I’d go back.

There was another place on a steep hill that where we had dinner a couple of hours after our first trip to Birra & Empanadas and I have to say that I grievously underestimated how much food they were going to give me and overestimated how much I would enjoy carnitas. They did a good job with the food – if carnitas are your thing these were in fact good carnitas – but circumstances conspired against them.

There was one night where we ate in our neighborhood at a place just across from the Plaza, a few doors down from the apartment. The food was good but you could tell that the place catered to the tourist crowd. Granted, we were tourists. But still. Perhaps the most obvious sign of this was the large table maybe fifteen feet away from us that was empty when we got there but was soon filled by an entire tour group of people significantly older than me plus a very hardworking local guide who loudly and patiently explained everything that was served to them, from the drinks to the food. I don’t think they had a full meal – they were in and out far more quickly than we were – but it was fascinating listening to her and I learned a few things in the bargain, so Win.

Somehow I also got ghosted by a coffee shop.

The morning I set out on my own to explore the neighborhood and take photos I distinctly recall walking by a coffee shop named Mistic Coffee – the lack of a “y” in the first word stuck in my head – and thinking that this would be a good place to remember for Kim, who likes her coffee in the morning. They even had a menu posted on the wall, a large black plastic square with many items on it, some of which I remember contained mushrooms because that’s just not what I would expect in coffee but I prefer tea so what do I know about coffee?

I never found it again. We looked for it. I even searched for it online. It vanished into the mist, leaving only the faint sound of laughter on the breeze, and Kim had to get her coffee elsewhere.

One place that wasn’t imaginary was El Batey, which Kim, Lauren and I wandered into while Sara was back at the apartment resting. This is another hole in the wall bar, but it’s much more famous – apparently this is where the Rolling Stones would hang out whenever they were in town. Alan Ginsberg read his poetry here, and Hunter S. Thompson wrote one of his books here as well. It was maybe a block or two from the apartment, so we had to stop by.

It's a bar.

It’s covered with graffiti that probably hasn’t been cleaned or painted over since the place opened shortly after the Spanish colonized the island, and you can get whiskey there, which is what I had. Kim got one of their specialty cocktails – something with rum in it – while Lauren stopped at the bubble tea place next door and brought that in. While we were there a group came in to look for some of the graffiti they had scrawled in that room a decade or so earlier. They didn’t find it, but it was interesting that they came by.

The other food adventure was something that Lauren and Sara shared on their own one night. They wandered down to a place near the grocery store called “Mr. Weenie Waffles,” which is exactly what it sounds like. For some reason penis-shaped things are popular items in Old San Juan – at least if you judge by the trinkets in the gift shops – and this was of a piece. They said they were good waffles.

They also had the female version, for those so inclined.

So we did not go hungry on our trip, and I will remember those empanadas fondly.