Dancing on Occam's Razor
If I'd wanted the right answers, I probably should've looked in simpler places.
Progress? Give It A Rest
Jun 25th
I’m not sure what this is about, or why today, but I wanted to share a couple of stories I’ve found having to do with the nature of progress and whether it is always better to plow under the old to make way for the new.
The first article from The Infrastructurist shows before-and-after photos of some of the nation’s more beautiful demolished train stations. The photo at left, for example, is New York’s original Pennsylvania Station, which was torn down in 1963 to make way for an ugly office building, an ugly arena, and a very ugly train station. Look at the scale in this waiting area! It’s a train cathedral! Many of these gorgeous old buildings were torn down and replaced with… nothing.
And the second piece from Good Magazine discusses the vanishing highway rest areas. Are states boarding up the highway rest areas because they don’t have the money to keep the lights turned on and the toilets fresh? Was the crime at rest areas ever all that bad? 
Or has someone hoodwinked drivers and families into thinking it’s actually better to stop at McDonalds when all you really want to do is stretch your legs and have a pee? The article discusses the highway rest areas as a kind of sociological touchstone of the late 1950s and early 1960s interstate highway building boom. I know I took so many road trips with my family as a kid that I have very fond memories of the rest areas from the east coast to the west coast. In the beginning, every state took pride in having their rest areas represent that state, to welcome the traveler, to say something about the state either through art or architecture. (This is what the Kentucky rest areas looked like.) Look at the photos in the article and then think of where you stop when you’re traveling by car these days. What? You don’t stop. OK, I think we’ve identified another problem with progress.
Hold the Mayo, Not the Vaccine
Jun 12th
Image via Wikipedia
OK, so if I actually do write here more often, I’ll guarantee you that it’s going to be pretty random. For example, I ran into this piece on the vaccine refusal movement, which reminded me of someone I know telling me about the current outbreaks of whooping cough in Minnesota and measles in England. Um… we have vaccines for those. Shouldn’t we be pretty much free of those particular bugs by now? Well, no. And part of the reason is that well-intentioned (yet paranoid and myopic) people are withholding vaccines from their kids, thereby jeopardizing the health of not only their own kids but everyone else’s. Thanks, Oprah. Let’s bring back polio, too.
Again, random. Not that any of us are likely to go out to really good restaurants in the current economy but, when you do, here’s something to bear in mind. Your mind is gullible and the restaurant owners know this. It turns out that there has been a study proving that you will spend more on a meal if the menu does not have dollar signs or the word “dollar” associated with the numbers for the meal or item price. That is, you may balk at an entree that says “$24″ or “Twenty-four dollars” but not so much if it just says “24.” That’s right. We’re stupid and they know it.
Saul’s Recorder Concert
Jun 4th
Just got back from Saul’s elementary school. It was the annual Recorder Club, end-of-year pizza party and concert. Here is Saul with his friends, Emma, Marcin, and Matt, playing “Prince Rupert’s March”:
A Little Off the Top
Jun 3rd
I know that most of Amy’s family knows about this site already, but for the rest of you… check out Old Jews Telling Jokes. The site is exactly what it says in its name — videos of old Jews telling jokes. Here is a (mostly clean) sample:
No Hover Zone
Jun 2nd
Image via Wikipedia
It’s the first week of June, which means that the end of the school year is rapidly approaching. Amy and I are always amazed at just how many events get crammed into the last few weeks of school. (The kids don’t seem to notice; clearly it’s easier to be a passenger than a driver when the calendar is full.) So, I suppose that’s made me notice a couple of parent-related stories this week. There’s an interesting piece over on Salon today concerning how perhaps the recession will finally mean the end of overparenting. Probably not.
And then I ran into an amusing site called 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son. The author is up to Rule 372 and counting. As an example, I give you Rule 358. “If you’re ordering food at a restaurant and have to make more than one substitution, order something else.” Some rules are male heir gender specific; some are not. That one… is not.
Movie Time
Sep 3rd
I believe I promised to upload clips from one or more of Abby’s shows. It turns out that the video shot of last spring’s middle school musical was unusable. So we never got anything of that. (Come to think of it, we don’t have anything from the fall one-act comedy, either. Hmm.) You get what you pay for.
HOWEVER, we did just receive a very nice DVD of Abby’s summer camp musical, Guys and Dolls. Computer geek though I may be, I have little experience using any software having anything to do with video. But I managed to rip two of Abby’s songs from the DVD and am posting them for anyone with a broadband connection to enjoy. (Take that as a warning, dial-up users. Caveat download.)
Anyhoo, Abby played Nicely-Nicely Johnson. In the first song, Guys and Dolls, she is singing a duet with Benny. The second song, Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat, is the big show stopper… well, near the end of the show. It was a fun show to watch and Abby says she had a lot of fun doing it.
While you wait for me to figure out how to edit and convert all of the videos Saul shot the last few months, here’s something of Saul I shot with the video feature of my pocket camera. For a shy guy, he’s a major ham in the privacy of his own home.
About Time
Feb 12th
You can’t imagine how much I’ve been hearing about how long it takes me to update this site. And, I plead guilty. I mean, it’s hard to argue when I’m sitting here, putting up photo albums that show not one, but two of Saul’s birthdays. No excuses, just photos.
Oh, and a video. I haven’t put up anything from Abby’s shows since she was in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown four years ago. So, here’s a little something from her summer camp show last year. This is Abby as Ziggy Montego in Dear Edwina, Jr. If I can figure out how to go from VHS to DV to my computer, I’ll try to put up something from 
her middle school production of The Boyfriend, too. And that will be just about a year after the show was staged and not coincidentally about the time her next show, Honk, will be happening. Think of this as a tape delay game.
As for Saul, he is obsessed with Legos and all else pales in comparison. You can probably imagine the lovely sound of nearly invisible, tiny plastic pieces going up the vacuum cleaner tube. Amy is currently coaching Saul’s second grade science fair team. They’re investigating how to clean up oil spills. Imagine 9 seven year olds, lots of water and oil and elbows and noise. Did I mention that Amy is doing it, not me? I did the introductory “What’s an Oil Spill?” slideshow. And then ran.
Well, enough of this. I’ll try to get back here again soon now that I see that this blog still works. I had this other one that ate itself while my back was turned.
Think spring, peeps.
Bunnyhopping with Mr. D
May 5th
My father died on Thursday, February 17th. I somehow suspect the Kentucky-South Carolina basketball game he watched on television Tuesday night was what killed him. Well, that and the congestive heart disease, the leaking heart valve, the diabetes, and so on. I still suspect bad basketball. We’ll never know.
What I do know is that my father lived the last few years of his life the way he wanted to live them. Take food, for example. For a man with dietary restrictions, he loved to cook. Somehow, he found compromises between his doctors’ orders and the perfectly assembled BLT. He called me a month or two before he died, extremely happy that he had finally found out how to make a meringue like his mother’s and had made a lemon meringue pie. This was something he had been obsessing about for years (probably since my grandmother died). No one could have enjoyed that pie more than he did.
He also enjoyed his friends. I gave him a computer a few years ago. And while he spent many, many hours playing solitaire on that computer, he also had an email account, which he used to share jokes and old age stories with his friends, both nearby and in other states. He had lunch with some friend or another, one or two times a week. He went to football games. He went to parties. He had more of a social life at the end of his life than he ever did when he was middle aged. He honestly enjoyed people. Everyone I’ve known who met my father later told me how impressed they were that this was a man obviously comfortable with anyone, anywhere. He fit in at a party with college professors just as easily as he did at a party with blue-collar, high school dropouts. Museums and tractor pulls. Libraries and titty bars. He fit in wherever he happened to be.
And my father loved driving. That’s something that never really changed. One of my best memories of being a kid was how, in the summer, my father would come home from work, we would have a quick dinner, and then he would pile me and my friend, Robin, into the car and we would take off. Sometimes we would go to the beach at Fort Boonesborough, down on the Kentucky River in Madison County. Other times, we would just go driving out in the country with the car windows down and our arms hanging out. Cooling off. Getting away. His car has over 100,000 miles on it and that’s no surprise.
The obituary section of the newspaper hosts online memorial guestbooks where people share memories online of people who’ve died. It’s no longer available online (well, not without paying for it), but my father’s guestbook was fun reading. Lots of his friends wrote interesting and funny things about my father, my grandfather, and the family business, Kentucky Auto Parts.
I miss him. It was unfair for a Kentucky basketball fan to die just before March Madness. It was unfair for a grandfather not to hear how his grandson learned to ride his two-wheeler or how his granddaughter’s latest play went. He had things he still wanted to do, to see, to share.
On the other hand, he didn’t die in a hospital. He didn’t have a stroke. He went fast and with dignity… and would have been happy to have had one more piece of pie before going. Other than that, I think it’s OK.
Have a great drive, Pop.
What Doesn’t Kill You
Jul 6th
Posted by Andy in Commentary
No comments
Image via Wikipedia
Just thought I’d quickly post a link to an article over on MSN.com about growing up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Being reckless, eating foods we now know are terrible, playing without pads, riding bikes without helmets and riding them fast, jumping off buildings to practice hitting the ground and rolling… not stuff our kids are likely to be doing. Are they better off wrapped in bubble wrap or is there a happy medium?