To continue an earlier post of astonishing importance, the DSL connection is back up here at Infospigot corporate HQ. All it involved was about an hour on the phone to India, an actual service call here at our Berkeley premises to confirm that our line was OK (it was), and the chance discovery that our provider, SBC, had actually changed the log-in required to connect to its network. Once I discovered this last fact — which was not advertised in advance, so far as I can tell, but was mentioned in a recorded service announcement I heard when I called the company for help — it was just a matter of figuring out what our account’s actual user name and password were. Thanks to Kate’s diligent retention of notes I made on our account about six or seven months ago, I realized at about Hour 54 of the Great DSL Crisis that the name and password were totally different from the ones I had been trying and trying and trying, in lab-monkey fashion, since Thursday.
Whatever Happened to …
… Infospigot?
Well, I started this new job, and that’s been absorbing my attention. And a few other things have been going on. And for reasons currently beyond my understanding and/or technical ability, our DSL connection is down right now. So I’m sitting on our front porch, listening to the traffic half a block away on Cedar Street, watching the cat watch the night come down on the neighborhood out of the corner of my eye. If everything works, I’ll post this using an unknown neighbors open Wi-Fi connection (their network is called “Martha,” but that doesn’t ring a bell).
Anyway, so that’s where I’ve been. More on the first few ays working for the University of California, and on other stuff, a bit later.
Employment Notes
In an unexpected turn of events, I’ve just been hired for a public-affairs position at the University of California’s law school, Boalt Hall. What’s unexpected is that two weeks ago, I didn’t even know this job was out there. But taking a look at the university’s job listings the Saturday before last, I noticed an opening for a senior writer doing media relations and development (fund-raising) work at Boalt. I posted my resume online and heard back pretty much immediately. A couple of interviews and several reference calls later, I got the job. I’m both excited and a little amazed; not that I was hired, because I’m not a complete bum; but because it happened so fast. Anyway, it’s going to be an intellectually challenging experience — the school’s dean, Christopher Edley Jr., is a recent Harvard transplant who has big plans on every front (expanding the school, for instance, hiring more faculty, and launching initiatives like the new Berkeley Civil Rights Project (a cousin of the project he started at Harvard in 1996). It ought to be pretty interesting to be close to the middle of all that. I start next Wednesday, and I’m going to walk to work.
Monday Meatballs
Thom was gone for the weekend, off on his first solo journey (with friends only, no shepherding adults) to a far-off music festival. It was a big deal event down at Coachella, in the desert east of Los Angeles. The New York Times took note (of the music, not Thom’s attendance); so did NPR. For Kate and me, the biggest deal was that Thom was off on his own on a trip that required two late-night drives — late Friday into early Saturday to get down there (it’s about a 500-mile trip), and late Sunday into early Monday to get back (Thom’s friends dropped him off in downtown Berkeley so that he could go straight to school to take a test). It reminds me of Eamon and his friends driving off late on stormy night to cross the Sierra on their way to see the Winter Olympics in Utah. The thrill of the road trip.
Anyway, he made it there and back, and had a great time that he talked about all afternoon and evening, when he wasn’t napping, and when we didn’t have "24" on the tube. To celebrate, Kate made spaghetti and meatballs (despite my a little too up-close-and-personal portrait of the meatballs, they were extra-tasty).
Double Zero, Double Ought
The topic was ear gauging. The Resident Teen was telling me he intends to gauge his ears. What that means, in brief, is stretching out an ear piercing so that you can fit a piece of jewelry into the enlarged hole; one piece of jewelry inserted into a gauged ear is a colored plug. It’s a modest piece of body modification, really, and one that the Teen’s mom and dad can live with a little more easily at this point than a tattoo, say, or rings or spikes of various descriptions inserted into various vicariously painful body locales.
In talking about the size of earlobe hole that he desired to produce through gauging, the Teen described the largest diameter typically done as “double zero” and held up his fingers to indicate about a quarter-inch. Hearing “double zero,” I immediately thought of “double ought,” one of the largest sizes of buck shot (it turns out there is a larger size — “triple ought”). I wondered if the double-zero gauge for ear piercing was the same diameter as double-ought shot.
Not to keep anyone in suspense, I still don’t know. But I started looking for information on the size of double-ought shot. The non-precise answers I came up with suggested a range equivalent to .30-caliber to .38-caliber bullets — that is, .3 to .38 inches.
I didn’t hunt long, because one of the first references I consulted, with a page title of “Firearms Tutorial,” was a discourse on wound ballistics — the study of damage caused to human tissue by different types of gunshots. I was slow to realize the subject, because I was focusing on finding the diameter of buckshot. The Google entry for the page suggested I’d find the information there. When I hit the link, I searched forward to “double-ought,” and found the statement, “A 00 or ‘double ought’ pellet is essentially equivalent to a low velocity .38 handgun projectile.”
Then I considered the context. In the next paragraph, I encountered this:
“At close range, the pellets essentially act as one mass, and a typical shell would give the mass of pellets a muzzle velocity of 1300 fps (feet per second) and KE (kinetic energy) of 2100 ft/lb. At close range (less than 4 feet) an entrance wound would be about 1 inch diameter, and the wound cavity would contain wadding. At intermediate range (4 to 12 feet) the entrance wound is up to 2 inches diameter, but the borders may show individual pellet markings. Wadding may be found near the surface of the wound. Beyond 12 feet, choke, barrel length, and pellet size determine the wounding.”
It turns out the “Firearms Tutorial” is a resource for forensic pathologists, giving an introduction to the world of guns and everything they can do to the body, with special attention, it seems, on close-range effects. Living in a place where the number of people who die each year of gunshot wounds rivals the total of deaths during the entire Iraq war*, it’s good to have such a resource at the ready.
(*On the statistics: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control report, “Deaths: Final Data for 2002,” (PDF file) puts the total number of U.S. firearms deaths for the year — the most recent the CDC has covered — at 30,242. (I was surprised to see that more than half of those deaths — 17,108 — were suicides.) It’s hard to know the real toll in Iraq since our war began in March 2003, but the Iraq Body Count site, which bases its estimates on an analysis of press accounts, puts the number of Iraqi dead so far at a maximum of about 20,000. The Iraq Coalition Casualties site puts the number of U.S. and allied troops killed so far at 1,726, and notes that at least 210 foreign contract workers have died, too). The big unknown in the total Iraq numbers is how many Iraqi troops and insurgent fighters have died since the fighting started. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?)
Opening Night
The Infospigot household, plus special guest (and friend of Thom) Jane, took in the Oakland Athletics home opener tonight. The final score found the hometown nine at a steep deficit to the visiting Toronto Blue Jays, a result that left the 44,000 witnesses chilled and uncharmed. (Just a second and I’ll be done with what I believe is a bad Roger Angell impression.) But the team has 80 more home games to play, so hope abounds.
I’ll say this, though: Everything was close to OK before the umpire went and wrecked things by saying “play ball.”
The A’s stadium, which now goes by the name of McAfee Coliseum or something like that, is impersonally massive since its reconstruction a few years ago to accommodate the East Bay’s professional football team. The main charm the big concrete bowl had before the remodeling was a view over the top of the outfield bleachers to the Oakland Hills. There’s still just a sliver of that vista visible from the cheap third-deck seats (ours came with an unadvertised obstructed view), and the evening sunlight on the ridge — even with a hillside stripped by a gravel quarry — is always striking. Just before the anthems were played — Canadian first, then ours — I noticed a couple of big birds soaring just over the rim of the stadium to our left. I thought they were turkey vultures at first silhouetted glance — an addition to the pigeons, California gulls, and barn swallows that claim the Coliseum as home roost — but as we kept looking, we realized they were red-tailed hawks. Both swayed and wheeled around a light tower on the third-base side of the stadium, and both eventually settled onto the white-painted grating of a workers’ platform at the base of the lights.
Then the anthems. Even though a Canadian guy I met in Ireland in 1973 pointed out that “O Canada” is a militarist hymn (“Listen to what they’re saying — ‘O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.’ On guard!”), I’ve always liked it, and Kate and I sang the few words we knew. Then a singer started into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a performance punctuated by loud fireworks. We sang along to that, too, despite my dislike of the current manifestation of our flag and patriotism cult.
But while we sang, both Kate and I kept scanning the sky around the stadium. Roy Steele, the public address announcer, alerted the crowd to expect a flyover from a pair of FA-18 jets from Lemoore Naval Air Station in the Central Valley (here’s a question: How much do those flyovers cost, and who pays?) when the anthem was done. Somewhere in the song’s last few bars, Kate said, “There they are.” And off to the southeast, a couple of tiny shapes trailing smoke headed for the rim of the stadium opposite us — heading straight for us, in other words. I said, “Stay way up there, you two.” There was just a dull roar till they climbed into the west behind us, then we were engulfed in a prolonged peal of thunder. I love seeing the big, fast planes. Too bad we can’t put them on permanent amusement duty.
Then the game started, and things went downhill from there. At least until the postgame scrambled eggs back here in Berkeley.
Duck
Our son Tom is a senior at Berkeley High, and as documented in these pages last fall (from Yreka and Eugene), decided the place he’d really like to go to college is the University of Oregon (home of the Ducks). He’s been pretty low key about it, but last Saturday, he came out of his room and said, “I’m going to Oregon.” He had been checking the U of O Web site and just seen that he’d been admitted (as a “pre-journalism” student).
Well done, I say. And all of a sudden, his departure for the next big chapter in his life is a lot — a lot — more tangible.
Family Business
It’s Ann’s birthday. That’s significant because she’s my sister, and the only one of my four siblings whose day of birth I clearly remember. The one recollection I’ve shared in the family to the point of bored weeping is seeing the family car, a red-and-white 1958 Ford station wagon, going around the corner of Monee Road and Indianwood in Park Forest as my brothers and I walked home from school at St. Mary’s.
We’d been home for lunch, and I remember what might have been a routine for my mom and dad, who were waiting for their fifth kid. Dad did accounting-type work at Spiegel’s, and I think he’s always had the habit of recording numbers that might be significant. At lunch, Mom was having contractions; when she had one, she’d tell Dad, who would look at his watch and write down the time on the back of an envelope. He’d been writing the times down since after we left for St. Mary’s earlier in the day, seeing how close the contractions were getting. I remember seeing the times and thinking something exciting was happened, though I wasn’t entirely sure what it involved beyond the expectation we’d have a new brother or sister at the end of it.
Dad drove Mom to Ingalls Hospital in Harvey. Chris, John, and I were having dinner with our neighbors, the Lehmanns, when Dad called about 5:30 to say we had a sister. Boy, did she have a treat in store. Somehow, she survived.
Happy Birthday, Ann. I won’t mention the exact year you were born, only that according to Popstrology, you were born in the Year of the Four Seasons, and your birth star is Connie Francis.
Al and the Ides
March 14th is Albert Einstein’s birthday. Since I’m unconversant with mathematics — though I can show off every once in a while with arithmetic — I can’t pretend to understand much about his theories of relativity except some of the changes they’ve brought. Lots of us leave a world completely changed from the one we were born into; he’s one of the very few who left a world his ideas had transformed.
And then there’s the 15th. The Ides of March, and if you want to know why it was called that — well, check here. All the historical and literary interest in the date stems from Julius Caesar getting knifed (44 B.C.) by pals. More personal interest attaches to the date because it begins a run of March and April dates that were birthdays of close friends growing up (and my sister’s birthday, too) — on the 15th, 21st, 22nd, 26th, 30th, 31st, and the 6th of April. Not dates I’ve written down — they just happened to stick in my memory, maybe because of the proximity of my own birthday. Whether I’ve been in touch with any of these people or not, I still think about each of them, if only briefly, as the days come each year.
The Habit
Dad and I talked on the phone earlier. The first thing he said was, “Are you all right?”
“Sure. Why?”
“There’s been nothing new on the blog since Thursday!”
How’s that for drama in real life? He was kidding, but he was right. And the remarkable thing is that I was conscious of it and trying to organize my poor thoughts into some kind of post earlier in the evening. This has gotten to be, for better mostly but on occasion worse, a daily habit. I told Dad I knew I had missed some days recently — partly because I’ve been out doing other stuff or partly because I needed to give the blog a rest — but that I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed two days in a row (and still haven’t) for several months. Saying that meant that I had to go back and check. And the last time I went two days without posting something — we’re not talking quality here, just regularity — was August 28-29.