This Is Not News

I was about to title this “Is this mic on” post “Shaking the Cobwebs Off,” but my browser autofill informed me that I had already used “Shaking the Rust Off” as a post title. Hooboy. Gonna try to do better. For warmups, here are some random thoughts.

One thing that I hope will happen over the course of the next year is that I’ll have more motivation to read and think about public policy because I’ll have some reason to believe that we as a country – and the leaders we select to act as our representatives – will be in a better position to enact sensible policies.

In order to make that hope a little more realistic, Pattie and I spent some time volunteering with the Barack Obama campaign during the Pennsylvania primary. It was an interesting experience, and kind of weird – for all the intensity that people worked with for weeks on end, the final result seemed to be pretty much what everyone expected. Then again, I suppose those expectations were set with the belief that people would be working as hard as they did. But it’s the weird paradox of being involved with a larger effort – the more you work to be a a part of it, the more you feel like you’re a drop of water in the ocean.

Still really happy with the REM album and still looking forward to the tour.

Overall it was a good semester of teaching, I think. I explored some new ways of encouraging participation. I think I need to keep doing more of that, but I also need to figure out how to do it in an organized way that doesn’t become all-consuming timewise.

Outside of sporting events, I’ve almost stopped watching TV. Stuff is mounting on the DVR, and I just don’t have the energy to watch it. Or maybe it’s patience and focus I’m missing. Man, if I’m not focused enough to watch TV, something’s gone crazy.

Well, something else.

So I’m on my way to class today to give an exam, and I’m reviewing in my head the instructions I have to give about people putting away their iPods and turning off their cell phones. And I think to myself, “I certainly don’t have to tell them to turn off their pagers. Wow, technology sure has changed since I graduated from college a decade ago.”

So, of course, I go to say “Turn off your cell phones” and out comes “turn off your pagers,” and everyone gets to laugh at the out-of-touch guy. Sheesh.

Just goes to show you how funny the human brain is. In a space of ten minutes the same mind that said there was no need to say something, said that exact thing. Sometimes I think my neurons need to do a better job of talking to one another.

I am feeling infinitely better about the Phillies’ loss in the NL Division Series. Sometimes another team is just on a roll and you’re gonna get squashed.

Congrats to the Colorado Rockies for storming the castle.

Over in the ALCS, I admit I’m rooting for the Red Sox, in no small part because of Terry Francona. But I can’t say I’d be too disappointed if Cleveland wins. Maybe the 2000s are just meant to be the era of breaking “curses.” Guess we’ll see.

1) None of my descendants have gone back to the Bronx in 1993 and persuaded me that taking Russian to fulfill my college language requirement is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

2) No one has gone back to Florida in 2000 and informed someone that maybe this butterfly ballot is an even worse idea.

At any rate, congratulations to Al Gore and the UN scientists who have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

OK, I swear, I am going to get back into the daily blogging habit again. It’s amazing how easy it is to fall off the wagon. Lately I’ve spent long periods of time staring at the screen, and about the only thing popping out of my head is:

I’m tired.
I’m tired.
Boy, I could use a nap right now.
Yep, still tired.

And I don’t think people need to read about that all the time. 🙂 Seriously, I’m getting into the swing of taking my daughter to kindergarten every day, which I have to say I enjoy even if it does involve scenes of frantic-guy-with-kid-piggybacking-on-shoulders-running-up-the-street-to-catch-a-bus once a week or so. So far, no late slips, so mission accomplished. Now I just need to carve a little more writing time into the schedule. Here we go!

Went to visit some college friends today, who are terrific people that have a daughter right around Alex’s age with whom she gets along with famously. On top of all this, when they moved down to the Philly area they bought an HDTV. So we had that on showing various sporting events in the background while we swapped stories and kept the kids from taking over the world. Or so we like to tell ourselves, anyway. Thanks to HDTV, we were able to tell that Tiger Woods was very, very warm when he won the PGA Championship today. I think I’ve mentioned before that I only turn on golf when Tiger’s about to win a major. There’s just something about someone at the top of his game doing things that no one else can really do that I like to see.

It also occurred to me today that when/if we ever get an HDTV, the important thing might be asking the store what a standard broadcast looks like on the HDTV. ‘Cause the imperfections of a standard broadcast can become even more noticeable, which is kind of a bummer. But ah well.

You know, some days it’s good to realize you can still be amazed. The space shuttle endeavor is currently in space for STS-118, an assembly mission to the International Space Station. One of the mission specialists is Barbara Morgan, a former elementary school teacher who has been a full time astronaut since 1998. Morgan was Christa McAuliffe’s alternate for the Teacher in Space mission aboard the Challenger in 1986.

21 years later, she’s in space.

I really have no words for how wonderfully cool that is.

Interesting feature on ESPN.com about Atlanta’s history as a center of the civil rights movement, and how that history motivates the way many people in Atlanta view the Michael Vick case.

There are certain parallels between the situation and the 2003 mayoral election here in Philadelphia. When a bug was discovered in the mayor’s office, it was not hard at all for some people to believe that the listening device was a racially and/or politically motivated attack against a black political figure. I was in the middle of doing research on Martin Luther King, Jr. for my thesis at the time, so I certainly couldn’t say it was impossible to conceive. And I’m not someone who really lived through that atmosphere of distrust.

In this situation I find myself vacillating somewhat. I know about the idea of innocent until proven guilty, and I believe in that from the criminal justice point of view. But from the what-do-we-think-of-the-man perspective, I’m not sure we’re under an obligation to pretend that nothing has happened to a public figure until the trial is over. And there seems to be a lot of evidence that one can use to draw a conclusion. I know people bring up the Duke lacrosse case as an example, but the way I remember things, within days of that story breaking, problems with the case and the evidence were coming to light. I just haven’t seen that happening yet.

But then again, I still have an instinct to trust the authorities, that there’s probably a good reason that they filed these charges. If I weren’t inclined to give them that benefit of the doubt, I’d probably have a very different perspective.

Can someone tell me when dialog became a preferred form to dialogue? This has been driving me nuts for a while.

It’s always the little things that send you to the nuthouse.

Not really a day that’s reaffirmed my faith in humanity. I was out running some errands and stopped off in a gas station convenience store to grab a Snapple. A woman was apparently in some kind of dispute with the cashier over an ice cream or something like that. I couldn’t quite get the details because a) I was trying not to eavesdrop, which was difficult because b) there was a lot of shouting going on. The woman was yelling something along the lines of “You’re an immigrant! Shut up! Shut up!” And after the woman left and I went to pay for my Snapple, the cashier said something to me along the lines of “Every time there’s a disturbance, it’s a black.”

So, yeah, many blows struck for compassion and a shared struggle against injustice and bigotry today. I’m not passing any specific judgment on the dispute I saw today – I have no idea who instigated it or who escalated it. By the time I got there it was past the point of no return. But I gotta think that the stereotyping both people did probably played a role of some kind in making a conflict more likely.

I dunno. No grand point here, just an observation that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while that I wanted to get into the electronic record.