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Love of the Game

Two excellent pieces in The New York Times Magazine today.

The first is a feature on IMG Academies in Bradenton, Florida, a private school set up to provide intensive sports training in baseball, basketball, soccer and other sports side-by-side with traditional academic subjects. It’s sort of the logical conclusion to the long-term trend of kids’ sports having become a scheduled, programmed, largely parent-driven part of kids’ lives. The story, by Michael Sokolove, captures the inherent strangeness of families that have decided to make huge investments in their children’s abilities to throw or hit a baseball or shoot a jumper (in some cases, parents are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars over the kids’ youth sports careers).

“As Tommy stretched and played catch along with about 30 other boys, his mother, Lisa, sat on a lawn chair in a shaded area, watching practice as she did every day. She was living with Tommy and his sister, Jacki, a college student, on IMG’s sprawling 180-acre campus in a $310,000 condominium that the family purchased last year, when Tommy enrolled at IMG as an eighth grader. Her husband, Chuck Winegardner, had stayed back on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to tend to his car dealerships, but he visited frequently for long weekends. Lisa called after every practice. ‘I need to give my husband full reports,’ she said. ‘What they’re working on, how he looks, is he paying attention.’ ”

The story touches on another phenomenon that I used to sit in the bleachers and bitch about when Eamon and Tom were playing youth league baseball: that the only sports experience the kids were having was of the organized league variety. Sure, I played some organized ball when I was a kid. But not a lot. I just wasn’t very good when I was younger. But I could always play in pick-up games and did whenever I had a chance. And eventually I grew into sports and developed a huge passion for them (people I’ve played with would probably say it went beyond passion to an unhealthy competitive intensity, and I can’t deny the evidence of that). Anyway, it always seemed sad to me to look out on a baseball diamond and see kids, sometimes my own, who looked like they’d rather be doing anything but getting steered around the field by whatever adult was in charge. Sure, I’m forgetting all the unhappy episodes that can and do happen when we organized our own games, but the point was we were out doing something we had a blast doing, most of the time, and it had nothing to do with what adults wanted us to be doing or with parents discharging their responsibility to make us well-rounded or with moms and dads living vicariously through our on-field exploits.

The second piece I really liked in the Times magazine today is “Sandlot Summer,” a short personal essay by Melissa Fay Greene. It’s just a nice take on an experiment in trying to give kids back some sense of the joy in spontaneous, unorganized sports you do because, gee, you just feel like doing them:

“My 16-year-old son, Lee Samuel, ran a baseball clinic with his teammates Andre Mastrogiacomo and Matt and Palmer Hudson. Here’s what the teenagers didn’t require of their players: tryouts; advance registrations; birth certificates; assignments to teams by age, sex and skill level; uniforms or team names; parent volunteers; snack schedules; and commuting to fields in distant counties in search of the appropriate level of competition.

“Here’s what the players didn’t miss: almost none of the above. (Uniforms are pretty cool.)”

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Grilled Cheese in Space

Earlier in the year, I covered the space teams that said they planned to launch for the X Prize — the $10 million purse offered for the first privately financed space launch.  Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne won the prize in October, and was the only team to try a launch. A group in Toronto, which came to be known as The GoldenPalace.com Space Program Powered by the da Vinci Project (the name of the volunteer effort tacked onto the name of their online-casino sponsor), got itself lots of media attention by declaring it would try to beat Rutan’s group to the punch. To be more accurate, it was the da Vinci Project’s leader, astronaut, and chief spokesman, Brian Feeney, who promised a launch.

Common sense suggested it was a long shot: Feeney’s team, which envisions launching its manned rocket from a balloon floating 15 or 16 miles above the prairie of western Saskatchewan, set its first X Prize launch for Oct. 2 without ever flight-testing its gear. Feeney would just climb into his capsule, light the rocket, and see what happened (the plan was to fly to 100 or 110 kilometers, then parachute back to the wide open spaces below; GoldenPalace.com also wants Feeney to play some sort of casino game loaded on a laptop in the capsule). The apparent lack of preparation aside, Feeney was always adamant: all sorts of computer modeling had been done, safety was assured, and  no one outside the project could possibly know the state of readiness.  Da Vinci would make its launch date; just wait and see.

In late September, Feeney backed off his October 2 launch date because da Vinci’s vehicle wasn’t ready. SpaceShipOne made its X Prize-winning flight on Oct. 4. Feeney was in the crowd of spectators at Mojave, still insisting he’d fly before the end of October. But his ship still wasn’t ready,  and the launch was rescheduled for an indefinite date before the end of the year. Which brings us to today, in late November.

Now, Canadian media outlets (the CBC and the Globe and Mail, for instance) are reporting that the da Vinci project is putting off its first launch until January. This time the upcoming holidays are to blame: "Over the holidays some people become extremely available and other people become totally unavailable. Although we are planning for an unmanned test flight, we still need a lot of logistical support."

Just a minute: unmanned test flight? Feeney used to talk about a full-on test of the launch system as though it were a frill and dismiss those who suggested at least one test flight was needed as if they were killjoys, people without a sense of adventure or imagination or who were tied to the tired old NASA way of doing things. OK, now he says there will be a test flight; he says it will go up by late January, with a manned flight to follow in the spring. Just a hunch: The January test date will be the next thing to go: Feeney’s always insisted that weather — cold, wind, whatever — is no factor for the da Vinci launch. He’ll think better of that when faced with reality. 

The best da Vinci Project tidbit in the Canadian papers right now comes from Andy Ogle of the Edmonton Journal. He’s got a story speculating that Feeney’s historic flight, whenever it occurs, will carry a 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich upon which some see the image of the Virgin Mary.

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Modern Marketing: The Sequel

Chestbed_3

We posted The Amazing Chest Bed on Craigslist on Tuesday, got about a dozen inquiries in all, and had a buyer Friday night. This morning, Kate and I delivered it to a couple who live in San Francisco’s Richmond District — out around 20th Avenue and Geary Boulevard. We took it apart and packed it into the Amazing Dodge Caravan last night, then drove it over there this morning. I meant to take my camera along to take a picture of where the bed wound up — the buyers had what amounted to a walk-in closed with a window that the bed fit into perfectly. Kate did most of the reassembly, we got paid, Kate had the purchaser sign a little receipt she made up (she made two copies, so he got one, too). The we drove home by way of the Golden Gate Bridge, stopping in Tiburon for a mediocre breakfast on the way.

That is all from Amazing Chest Bed Central.

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Mom’s Day

So, certain dates come to have a meaning of their own. For me (and for the rest of my family, I think), November 26 is Mom’s birthday. She would have been 75 today. Born in Chicago in 1929, just a month after the stock market crash. Knowing that, and knowing what happened in the world over the first 12 years of her life (the Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the fascists and Nazi Germany, the war in Europe, Pearl Harbor), I’ve always imagined that she was born into a world that must have seemed, to her parents, to be on the verge of chaos or calamity. But it probably just wasn’t that way. I’ve heard that her dad, who worked for the First National Bank in Chicago, was never out of a job. At some point in the ’30s after the last of her six kids was born, her mom went back to work as a grade-school teacher in Chicago. They never lost their home or anything like that, and in fact seemed to have been an anchor for relatives who weren’t doing as well. So all that stuff happening out there in the world someplace probably seemed remote from the day-to-day cares of raising a family. And when tragedy made an indelible mark on their lives, it had nothing to do with the wider world: one of Mom’s brothers and three other relatives drowned in Lake Michigan one summer day in August 1939, her father died on lung cancer in June 1941. By then, of course, the big troubles from outside were starting to squeeze in on everyone, though maybe the family story and the world story never really did twine together; I guess I imagine they did from having a rough outline of what was going on around the family in my head, on one hand, and having heard lots of stories from Mom (and Dad) about those years.

Anyway, Mom, happy birthday. Thanks for — among all the other things — giving us so much to remember and to think about.

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What’s the Frequency? Seldom

Dan Rather‘s quitting as anchor of the CBS Evening News, and that’s on the front page of both papers we get (the San Francisco one and the New York one). We’re sort of a news-oriented family, but we don’t watch Dan (or Tom or Peter or Jim, or any of their cable counterparts) and haven’t for a long time. I watched the cable news outlets during the day when I was working at TechTV out of professional interest; after all, we were doing a daily news show. And yes, when there’s a compelling breaking-news reason, like the election or a disaster or we’re going to war again, we’ll turn on network news. Watching usually serves as a reminder of how shallow, wooden, obvious, and journalistically unadventurous TV news is. What it’s good for, mostly, is showing pictures of things, and given the quality of the information or commentary that come with the images, most of the time you’re just as well served with the sound turned down.

And the ratings numbers make it look like a lot of people feel the same way. When Rather took over the CBS anchor job from Walter Cronkite in 1981, the Chronicle says, the Evening News had a Nielsen rating of 13.6 — that’s 13.6 percent of all the TV households in the United States. Now the number is 5.1. The Chicago Tribune has a story today recounting the long slide of network news ratings; in 1980, the combined audience share for the evening network news shows was 72 — that’s 72 percent of all the TVs in use at a given moment; in 1990 the number was down to 57, and now it has fallen to 36.

Obviously, people have a lot more news choices now: many choices on cable TV as well as the most compelling and addicting news channel of them all, the Net. But you have to wonder if the decline and collapse of the network news model was or is really inevitable. Would better and deeper news values over the decades made a difference? One of the major irritations and disappointments of major cable and network news shows is that the presentation seems so formulaic and the stories so pat; that’s one reason “The Daily Show” seems so inspired — it both sends up the “real” news shows and lampoons them for the way they shy away from controversy.

One interesting thought for CBS from the 2004 “State of the News Media” report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism: The network should become the news voice for the major lifestyle and entertainment outlets its parent company, Viacom, owns. Quoting analyst Andrew Tyndall, the report says:

“If … CBS News was responsible for news for children (on Nickelodeon), for youth (on MTV), for African-Americans (on BET), for men (on Spike), on the radio (Infinity) and so on, it would once again address the mass market that Cronkite once did and put the Tiffany in Viacom, as it were. That potential audience for CBS News is already waiting in Viacom’s distribution system, but the news division just does not have the vision or the corporate ambition to revive its once-famous name.”

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Modern Marketing

Cimg2782

For months now, we’ve had Tom’s old bed — a pretty nice twin-size platform bed with six drawers — sitting in our living room. I thought it would be easy to sell. I posted ads on Craigslist, which for the uninitiated is a kind of online flea market where you can find anything. The service started here in San Francisco, and I actually worked with the founder briefly at the online project I joined when I left The Examiner. It was a big mailing list then, and now it’s a hugely successful community and e-commerce site that eBay has bought into. I’ve sold a bike there and bought A’s playoff tickets on zero notice, so I know it works.

That knowledge aside, Tom’s bed will just not move from our cramped premises. I posted two perfectly competent and ordinary ads in June for a "twin-size chest bed and mattress." I linked to the maker’s fine pictures of the bed. I gave a very clear description. We didn’t get a single response. And there in our living room the bed still sits. Kate and I have talked about giving it to a charity. But yesterday, I was seized with just enough initiative to take a few digital pictures of the bed and try another Craigslist posting.

When I sat down to write this time, though, I realized I had it all wrong. So without thinking about it, the "twin-size chest bed and mattress" became "It’s The Amazing Chest Bed." After I wrote that heading, everything else fell into place (check this link for the Craigslist posting for the full effect; the ad text is below). The bed is now a happening.

Has it sold, you ask? Well, not yet. I’ve had seven inquiries about it since yesterday, though. So maybe it’ll move this time.

***

It’s The Amazing Chest Bed

It’s the ultimate experience in sleep for persons of a certain size and/or age. A chest bed with six generous drawers and a headboard that offers extra storage. The mattress is a nearly new extra-long twin size (requires extra-long twin sheets; regular twin size won’t fit; more on dimensions below). If you’re tall and skinny, it’s perfect for you. If you have a family member who may someday get tall and skinny (we do, but he quickly outgrew this mattress), it’s a perfect size for you (and whoever that person is), too. But don’t take our word for it — check it out for yourself! While we’d like to offer test sleepovers in our smartly appointed Berkeley digs — we could have hot chocolate and a warm fire and listen to "Winnie-the-Pooh" — we can’t accommodate the throngs we expect to demand the right to purchase this article. So you’ll have to be content with checking out pictures of The Amazing Chest Bed, images taken at great expense by a locally renowned furniture photographer.

We’re asking $250 for The Amazing Chest Bed — a small price for a piece of furniture that could conceivably have had a featured role as a prop in the popular USA Network series "Monk," starring Tony Shalhoub. We paid $900 for the bed, headboard and mattress.

Act now, and we, the soon-to-be former owners of The Amazing Chest Bed will consider bringing it over to your place (please: Western Hemisphere addresses only) at no extra cost. For the extra-practical-minded: Dimensions are: Bed platform/drawer unit: 76 1/4 inches long x 38 inches wide x 24 inches tall. Mattress: 80 inches long x 38 inches wide x 10 inches high. Headboard: 8 1/2 inches deep x 38 inches wide x 50 inches tall. So combined length of mattress, platform and headboard is about 88 1/2 inches. Combined height of platform and mattress is about 34 inches.

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Year of the Spigot

Ah. The dishes are done. The laundry’s all folded. The bed’s freshly made. If I had anything to do with any of that, I could bask in a warm glow of accomplishment.

However, I am sitting in blog central, contemplating the day. A word comes to mind. A not particularly attractive word. Blogiversary. I thought I’d drop it in here as part of marking the one-year anniversary of this continuing distraction. But I googled "blogiversary" and found 17,500 instances of it online; all web loggers congratulating themselves on their one or two or three years or more, some will claim, of this.

So, I’ll just go to the numbers. Three hundred seventy and some-odd posts. (In transferring stuff over from my original Radio Userland home, I culled a handful of items that even I didn’t get the point of.) Maybe a couple hundred comments posted; a few by me. Lots and lots of words. I’ve got a little application that gives me a word count on each and every post, but I haven’t got to the point of actually adding it all up. But if I’ve written an average of 250 words per post (and we’re at about word 221 for this post right … now), which seems conservative, then I’ve spewed 90,000 or so words here. There. That’s my book.

Part of this exercise is listening for the splash when you drop your pebble down the well. So, the comments, written and otherwise, from the small knot of regular readers are all rewarding. Maybe I’m listening for a bigger splash; I always do when I publish a piece somewhere, and I’m always let down when I put a lot of work into a story and hear nothing, or a murmur so low it might as well be silence. You shrug it off and just do the work as an end in itself; and also because, when you’re writing for pay, you’re keeping body and soul together. This is different, but still, you’d like to have an idea who’s reading and whether the words you put together have an impact.

I have no idea if anyone even saw my first throat-clearing post a year ago. It’s probably best if no one did. But a year later, thanks to a traffic-tracking site that’s probably violating privacy twelve ways to Sunday (where’d that expression come from?), I can see that just today people have hit the blog from Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Italy, Jordan, and Yemen.

I know the explanation for that, I think: I write about plenty of topical stuff, it gets indexed by Google, and when people go out to find something about why U2 says "uno, dos, tres, catorce" (one, two, three, fourteen) at the beginning of one of their songs, I have a post about that. And one about a Florida woman who channeled God into a full-page ad in The New York Times before the election. And one about the United Fascist Union candidate for president. And another about writer Ron Suskind’s somewhat unnerving picture of the force of fanatical religious faith in the Bush administration. Whether or not I had anything useful to say about any of those things, people who were interested in them came looking. And that’s still what surprises me and impresses me most about the Net’s chaotic jumble: It can be all serendipity, all the time.

Looking at blogs more closely the last year, it’s also clear that a lot of what’s going on out here is people venting and talking past each other. I know that’s not news and critics of blogging as an information medium have focused on how a lot of online "discussion" is really people listening for voices shouting messages that reinforce their beliefs while filtering out or shouting down those with whom they disagree. To the extent that’s true, I think it’s just a reflection of what’s happening everywhere else in our society now. Open minds, or even people willing to reason and talks thing through, seem in critically short supply.

So here’s to keeping minds open. To avoiding writing what my friend Pete once termed "just more blather." And to paying attention to Tom Stoppard’s caution to be honest with words: In "The Real Thing," the middle-aged playwright protagonist Henry is lectured by his 17-year-old daughter Debbie on love and sex. She concludes, "… What free love is free of, is propaganda." To which he says, ""Don’t get too good at that."

"What?" she asks.

"Persuasive nonsense. Sophistry in a phrase so neat you can’t see the loose end that would unravel it. It’s flawless but wrong. A perfect dud. You can do that with words, bless ’em. How about ‘What free love is free of, is love’?"

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Unlimited Visibility

Hillstview

We’ve had two days of gusty northerly winds. The result today was you could see forever. Kate and I walked up to the upper reaches of the hills in town. Up above Grizzly Peak Boulevard and adjacent to Tilden Park there’s a steep, narrow lane called Hill Street. It ends in a short footpath named for Scott Newhall, a legendary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle who lived up there and  in the 1960s dreamed up a story on why coffee in the city was so bad (the also-legendary headline: "A Great City Forced to Drink Swill"). The path connects to a southern segment of Hill Street, which runs back down to Grizzly Peak but also leads by a couple other small lanes into Tilden (the street geography won’t mean much to non-Berkeleyites). The picture above was taken right where the northern part of Hill Street runs into the path; we were looking back across the northern part of Tilden (the hills are already starting to green up) to the mountains in Napa County. You can just make out a little nub sticking up near the center of the picture, above the distant ridge (it was much clearer just eyeballing it). That’s Mount Saint Helena, which stands at the northern end of the Napa Valley, 58 miles from where we were standing (I checked the distance on mapping software).

Mounttam

And the second picture is the dusk silhouette of Mount Tamalpais taken just as we headed down Buena Vista Way back toward the Berkeley flatlands. A great day to be out for a walk.

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Kevin Sites Speaks

First, let’s briefly recap the Kevin Sites saga: A freelance cameraman and journalist covering the Fallujah offensive, he videotaped a Marine shooting a wounded, unarmed Iraqi insurgent in a mosque. The tape was shot on a “pool” basis, so eventually it was fed not just to the company that Sites is under contract with, NBC, but to other outlets, too. Predictably, the image and the unclear context of the shooting — was the insurgent armed? was there an immediate threat there that could not be seen in the video? — have touched off a controversy. The video is the latest helping of anti-American fodder for broadcasters in the Arab world. In the United States, the main reaction to the video has come from the right: The video serves as further proof that the mainstream media is only interested in undermining our war effort and support for the troops. Sites has been the target of especially vicious commentary online, with many accusing him of trying to score a prize-winning scoop at any cost and some suggesting he ought to be physically harmed for reporting the incident.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been checking Sites’s blog daily to see if he’d post his account of the shooting and of the afternath. Of course, I hadn’t checked today,and then I got an email from my brother John saying there was a new post there. It’s titled “Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1” — the unit he’d been accompanying during the fighting. He tries to explain to the Marines he’s been covering (in a sympathetic way, I’d add) exactly how the event unfolded before, during, and after the shooting. And he does his best to explain to the guys what’s at stake in reporting what’s going on over there:

“I interviewed your Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, before the battle for Falluja began. He said something very powerful at the time-something that now seems prophetic. It was this:

” ‘We’re the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman’s war here — because we don’t behead people, we don’t come down to the same level of the people we’re combating. That’s a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old Marine who’s been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That’s a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor — and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground.’

“I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.

“So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera — the story of his death became my responsibility.

“The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.”

From reading this guy’s stuff since early last year, I believe he’s impeccably honest. I think he explains what happened and the bigger issues he was thinking about as well as can be expected. I’d love to know how the Marines he’s addressing react to what he says. I expect that few of people who’ve been screaming that he’s subhuman and a traitor will be mollified.