Month: December 2005

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Cruelest Irony

ESPN’s Stuart Scott and Neil Everett go way deep on the death of the son of Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy:

Everett (opening SportsCenter): Death always comes too early … or too late. Alongside Stuart Scott, I’m Neil Everett.

Scott: In an instant, Tony Dungy trying to game plan against a team he might well see in the Super Bowl but in a meaningless regular season game Christmas Eve becomes meaningless itself.

Cruel irony — all season long we’ve been prophesizing when the Indianapolis Colts would lose, and when they finally did lose and failed to become just the second team ever to open fourteen and oh, we discussed how that loss might affect them, never contemplating that a real loss hits harder than anything on a football field.

If I thought there was a remote chance that ESPN or any other broadcast outlet might be moved to say something on the air about my passing — or, hell, anything about me, period — I think I’d consider a pre-emptive payment to get the enterprising journos to do a story on the local hamster overpopulation problem or something else that might be within their abilities. Anything to avoid a TV eulogy.

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Notes

Note 1

As John B. points out, there’s a hoax question hanging over the story about the Massachusetts student who says he got sweated by the Department of Homeland Security for trying to get Chairman Mao’s original, unexpurgated “Little Red Book” through interlibrary loan (see my previous post). OK — the original story does have vague elements I noticed but didn’t pay attention to: mostly the fact the entire story is secondhand. That having been said, no one has shown yet that that the story is untrue, and (famous last words) the reporter who wrote it says he stands by it. BoingBoing is doing a pretty good job following the hoax allegation.

Note 2

A long, cold bike ride in the rain sounds like it builds character (or affords one the chance to display the character you’ve already built), but: Last Saturday, I went out on what was supposed to be a 95-mile ride down to a town southeast of Berkeley called Livermore. By the time we left at 8 a.m., the chance of rain for the day was up to 60 percent — but it sounded as if the incoming storm wouldn’t arrive till mid-afternoon at the earliest. Of course, it started raining about 10:30 or so, maybe 10 miles north of our turnaround destination. Most of our little group of riders bailed and rode over to catch a commuter train back to Berkeley. Still, we were on the road for 20 miles in the rain, and by the time we got to the train station it was 39 degrees (chilly for the Bay Area). So I got to demonstrate my mettle. And since Sunday, I’ve been home sick with the first real cold I’ve had in many months. From now on, I’m going to reserve my character-building activities for warm, dry days.

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More Men of Zeal

By way of my brother John, who saw this on BoingBoing:

Agents’ visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior

NEW BEDFORD — A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further. …

No further comment needed.

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Berkeley Flood Terror

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Well, the mainstream media is giving all its precious attention to stories like Iraq and what Bush is doing to protect us from ourselves, so the networks and big-shot papers like The New York Times will be ignoring the plight of a Berkeley neighborhood (mine) struck by the ravages of minor flooding for about half an hour earlier today.

It’s been a dry fall for the most part, but it started raining hard late last night. Just before 11 this morning, we had about 15 or 20 minutes of very intense rain as a line of thunderstorms moved over. I found one online rain gauge in the Oakland Hills that got .85 of an inch of rain between 10:30 and 11:30, and a station up at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science recorded a rainfall rate of 2.4 inches an hour at 11 a.m. But after a while, the rain slackened, then stopped entirely as the storm moved to the northeast.

About 20 minutes later, Kate exclaimed about a river flowing through our back yard. I looked out, and half the yard had turned into a stream bed, with water running out toward the street. About eight inches more, and the water would have been flowing through the house. Out on the street, the three houses to the south of us had water tumbling down driveways and cascading down front steps (all of our homes are built in the channel of Schoolhouse Creek, which many decades ago was piped into a massive underground culvert that drains into the bay).

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The earlier deluge had been so intense that the culvert had apparently filled with water and started to back up through the storm sewers, which flowed back out onto the streets. A large pond formed on California Street, a block to the east and slightly uphill. When the pond got high enough — high enough to float a minivan out from the curb and to stall out a class GM station wagon whose driver tried to drive though — the water did what it does naturally and flowed straight through our yards toward the Bay. We’ve lived in our house going on 18 years, and we’ve seen it rain very hard here, but this is the first time we’ve seen anything like flooding here.

Once the storm sewers started flowing again, though, the pond drained away in less than half an hour.

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The 2005 Man of Zeal Award

And the award goes to … George Walker Bush. Again.

The president says allowing the National Security Agency to secretly intercept the communications of whoever the government sees fit to scrutinize ” is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives.”

Someday, maybe there’ll be an accounting of all the good work this spying program achieved. Until then, we’ll have to take the president’s word for it. By now, I’ve got a pretty strong opinion of what that’s worth.

Last year, I wrote something brief about Olmstead v. United States. The term “landmark decision” is overused in reference to the rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States. But because of a brilliant dissent by Associate Justice Louis Brandeis that cut through the legalistic myopia of the court’s majority in a 1928 wiretapping case, Olmstead became a fundamental declaration of a right to live free of “every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed.”

Of course, the president, his cohorts, and their defenders are a step ahead of Brandeis’s objection. They say what they are doing is not only justifiable, it’s a necessity for “saving American lives.” Again, don’t wait up late for proof — that would be only helping our enemies. And haven’t we done enough for them already?

In Olmstead, Brandeis anticipated justifications such as the one the president proffers now. He wrote: “.. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. …”

Men of zeal, without understanding. Engrave it on a plaque. Send it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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We’ve Got Lights

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Thom and I put up our outside lights this afternoon. The process featured a tangled extension cord — Thom undid it, using mysterious skills he learned in the Sea Scouts — and my mostly silent concern that in my 50-plus clumsiness gravity would get the better of me, I’d pitch off the roof and wind up as a 1-column, 2-inch item in a local daily as a seasonal casualty. I’m still here, and noting the concern, so the worst didn’t come to pass. In fact, it only took us about half an hour to hang the strings, and everything was lit up by dusk.

Now we’re set till that day after the first of the year when the ladder comes out and I go back aloft to take the lights down.

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Whither?

If you noticed something different about the blog earlier: Typepad, the paid service that hosts this here site, had a major service outage starting late Thursday night. I didn’t notice until I tried and failed to post something around midnight. A side effect of the outage: The service was forced to rely on a five-day old backup version of hosted blogs, so the most recent visible posts were from last Saturday.

If you’re reading this, the service is back to normal. And if you didn’t notice anything missing in the first place: As you were.

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Game of Knaves

Cribbage: The game of knaves, or at least of people who like to play cards. (Reported origin: The Wikipedia article on the game says it was invented by a British poet, Sir John Suckling. in the 17th century. Really.)

It’s an official Subject of Interest (SoI) because Thom, home from school for his Christmas break, wants to polish up his skills so that he can beat his roommate next quarter (the roommate has proven dominant in a more cutting-edge entertainment, Madden NFL 2006). So he hunted for our board out in the shed, and the last couple of nights we’ve played. For the uninitiated, it’s a pure numbers game, with a special emphasis on putting together combinations of cards that add up to 15; play too much and you’ll drift off to sleep thinking of great cribbage hands (my favorite: a 4-5-6, with any one of the cards doubled; I can hardly begin to tell you how exciting it is). There’s more to it than that — much more — but that’s a central feature.

Interesting that cribbage has come into the picture. Growing up, my family was given to games like — excluding those of a purely psychological nature — Scrabble,Yahtzee, Milles Bornes, and Monopoly. Chess and Risk sometimes, though the disadvantage of board games was the way they tended to fly into the air at particularly tense moments. Uno. Hearts. Spades. Trivial Pursuit, when it arrived. A made-up trivia game called “the alphabet game.” But no cribs.

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Just Once

Just once I’d like to be out on the road — driving, cycling or walking — and not find myself saying, in a tone considerably above sotto voce, “What a f___ing a__hole!” to my fellow road users.

This isn’t really a plea for everyone else to reform. I mean, I’d like it if people like the UPS driver who looked me straight in the eye as I approached an intersection on my bike this morning would have refrained from easing out in front of me as if daring me to smash into the side of his truck. But what are the chances that other people are going to suspend their road antics just because I want them to? The true answer would be a negative number, if that were possible, but for purposes of this discussion I’ll settle for zero.

What I’m looking for is the day I’ll rise above it all and just smile and wave when someone cuts me off. Either that, or just admit to myself that I’ve long since joined the fun and that for every time somebody does something to trigger a stream of profanity from me, I’ve probably pressed someone else’s buttons the same way.