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  • Lost Heroes of Yesteryear

    We all have heroes. For some it’s their parents, while for others it’s firefighters, soldiers, or the guy who invented Cheez Whiz.

    I always liked Ronald McDonald.

    Here’s a guy who remains joyful and happy all the time while maintaining a trim physique on a diet that should very well have killed him long ago. Not that I blame him.

    Sure it’s possible he goes home a few times a week and whips up some low-fat chicken parmesan, but you know the rest of the time he’s pounding down a combination of Big Macs, Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese and chasing everything with a sundae and an M&Ms McFlurry. Again, not that I blame him.

    But recently Ronald has come under some suspicion. Like many heroes, there became just too many questions that remained unanswered. We’d like to look past these things, since after all our heroes remind us of an idyllic world in which everything is perfect and nobody acts unethically. Sometimes, though, the evidence is just too much to ignore.

    Look at Barry Bonds, a guy whose poster I proudly put on my wall 10 years ago. Now, I don’t even pay attention to the “milestones” he accomplishes, though I’ll be the first one to say he’s never been convicted of anything. That’s what happens when speculation overcomes heroics.

    For Bonds it was steroids. For the Cheese Whiz guy, it was the sex scandal. For Ronald McDonald, it’s Grimace.

    Grimace is a close second as my favorite member of McDonaldLand. He’s squishy, he’s purple and he loves milkshakes. I love milkshakes too.

    But to Ronald, Grimace signified the end of his empire. As people became more health conscious, Ronald became more paranoid. Here he is appearing in commercials with a fat guy who brags about sucking down McDonalds products. He sends America the message that eating at McDonalds makes you chubby and purple, or in the case of the Hamburglar, leaves you addicted to the food and turning to a life of crime in order to satisfy your fix.

    It’s no wonder you don’t see Grimace on TV anymore. They probably dumped his body in Lake Michigan, right next to the Fry Guys whose only crime was having their growth stunted so badly that Ronald feared a link between fries and dwarfism.

    It’s times like these that a great democracy is tested. Do we stand by and let these atrocities happen, or do we find those responsible and hold them accountable?

    Next time you go to McDonalds, ask them what happened to Grimace. Their silence, or their insistence that they don’t understand what you’re talking about, is all the evidence you need.

    Here’s to Grimace, a true hero who won’t be forgotten.

    September 27, 2006 McDonald's Uncategorized

  • Caution: Automatic Blog…update

    Back in February I wrote about automatic doors and how it was entirely unnecessary to be warned that they are, in fact, automatic.

    Basically they move out of your way, requiring no action from you and should only require a warning to those who have A) never seen them and B) have heart problems that can be worsened by seeing such shocking things.

    Writers usually have a lot of story ideas, including many “evergreen” topics that can be trotted out whenever they have no pressing items to cover or just don’t feel like doing anything “new.” Sometimes, you sit on a story because you are lazy.

    Such is this update.

    A month or so ago I had dinner with some family, including my cousin Lauren. She brought up a piece to this automatic door puzzle that had completely escaped my mind: The automatic revolving door.

    Now it’s not that I hadn’t experienced one before. The building that houses the post office in Hyattsville, Md., where I used to reside, has exactly such a beast. It’s pretty sweet since most revolving doors are pretty heavy and require a lot of initial force to get them to rotate.

    These no-effort doors only move when you trip the sensor, and then only move at one speed (after accelerating up to that speed of course).

    That’s where the danger comes in.

    With a normal revolving door, you approach with several things in mind. First, you peer through to see if anyone is coming from the opposite side, which would make the door suddenly start spinning out of your control. Second, you know it takes effort to get it going, so you’re hopping into your compartment with a little speed to strike the door with.

    When the door moves on its own, both of those become different situations. When someone comes from the other side, the door is going to start moving out of their control as well. That means they will probably wait an extra second or two to judge the speed of the door before picking a compartment to enter. For you, that means adjusting your speed as well since you no longer have to worry about them moving the door too fast or slow for you to get in.

    When you do enter, your speed must be different than in the old-fashioned setup. You need only to judge the speed and jump in, then walk fast enough to avoid the back of the door but slow enough that you don’t run into the front.

    With so much to consider, it’s no wonder these doors have warnings on all sides letting you know of their automatic nature. Those are truly valuable stickers.

    And in case you thought this was the end of my musing on revolving doors–after all, how much more could there possibly be?!–don’t fret. I bring to you also the quasi-automatic door, the ones that open for you once you press a button.

    Now these are usually designed for the handicapped, as denoted by the international handicapped symbol on the buttons that one must push in order to engage these doors. But sometimes they are built for the lazy or the guy who just has a lot of stuff in his hands and finds it easier to get into the building that way. To each his own.

    This too is another place where I applaud the signs warning you about the door. You may have seen someone in the past walking through without opening it themself and thought it was fully automatic. In such a case you’re probably walking right into that bad Larry, causing at least a few broken bones and probably spilling that double mocha frappuccino you had in your hand.

    So seeing the sign, you are then given ample time to make a few adjustments. You can either sidle over to that button–performing the underused hit is with your hip maneuver–or proceed as if it is a normal door.

    A further note, sometimes these doors don’t open very easily by hand and thus the warning can allow you to put some more mustard into your pull and not look like a weakling in front of passersby. And I sincerely hope this is the end of this train.

    September 27, 2006 Uncategorized

  • Wednesday Studies

    Wednesday is one of my favorite days of the week. And no, it’s not because it’s Hump Day, though that does add to its appeal. Wednesday is interesting-study day in the Washington Post.

    Richard Morin, a fellow at the Pew Research Center, has a Wednesday column that analyzes some interesting studies that have come out of the academic and think-tank world. There’s one longer analysis followed by three or four annotated studies. It’s usually in the last three or four that the true gold lies.

    Take this week. The last study is from some business professors in the Netherlands, who Morin says found that “people will accept two mailings from charitable organizations soliciting donations before they start to get really irritated.”

    The professors conclude through their study that the more times you ask for money through the mail, the less you’re actually going to get because you are going to just end up pissing off the people who would have donated.

    Now that’s pretty much what you would expect to happen, but when empirical data is put behind it, you hope that somewhere people are paying attention and can adjust their actions accordingly…maybe…

    One of the more interesting ones was a study about how clueing people that one of their attributes might be being tested can affect how they do on a particular test. So a survey that asks questions about gender issues can make men and women score differently on a subsequent math test.

    Morin says, “The phenomenon is known as ‘stereotype threat’–a kind of performance anxiety discovered in 1995 when psychologists found that black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form.”

    In this study, women did worse on the math test after being asked questions that made them think about gender. Later, the women did much better on a math test after being asked about their experiences living in the northeast–no gender involved.

    ABC’s 20/20 tackled this kind of study in an episode this month called “Race and Sex: We think, but can’t say stereotypes and biases.” They talked about a teacher who told her students one day that those of them with blue eyes were smarter and always did better on tests. The next day, the kids with blue eyes completed a flash card drill minutes faster than those with brown eyes. The kids with brown eyes cried because they thought they were inferior. The next day, she said she had made a mistake, and that actually it was the brown-eyed kids who were smarter. Those kids did better on the flashcard drill by minutes that day. When the kids were finally told that it didn’t make a difference, the times evened back out. Being told they were inferior made them perform as an inferior.

    You might think such an exercise is bogus because kids are more impressionable. But today, that same teacher conducts seminars with adults using the same methods…with the same results. She does the seminars to show how an inferred bias can affect performance, presumably so that the participants can adjust their own behavior to avoid such actions.

    Though there is also recent data that shows such sensitivity-type training isn’t working so well, that the participants go back to work without really changing the way they act even with the new information they have received. (I read this story earlier and for the life of me cannot remember where, thus no link…)

    September 27, 2006 Uncategorized

  • Fish Added to Terrorism Fight

    In case you didn’t know, one of the best defenses our nation has put forward to combat bio-terrorism involves having our drinking water monitored by fish.

    There’s no scientist taking daily samples or filtering system that’s supposed to send off alerts when certain substances appear in the water. No no, one of our most precious resources is being left up to fish.

    As reported in the Washington Post this morning, water supplies in Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco are being monitored using a system developed by the US Army and a private firm using bluegill fish.

    Basically, a set of fish swim in their own little tank that has continuously changing water from the region’s water supply. The fish act normally when everything is ok–or at least as OK as the water ever gets. When a toxic substance is introduced into the water, the fish freak out, alerting a human to take some sort of action to prevent people from drinking the contaminated goods.

    In case you’re wondering, the fish work for just two weeks before getting a vacation. I mean, we really can’t have the fish being overworked now can we? But I suppose if we are leaving our water supply up to a few fish that I could go catch myself, we want them to be in tip-top shape. God forbid we would have some other way of measuring if there is something toxic in the water.

    Though we don’t know exactly how many people are being serviced by the bluegill detectors–for security reasons, of course–at least 4.5 million people in the D.C. area have been drinking the fish-monitored water for at least six months now.

    I definitely feel safer.

    September 19, 2006 Uncategorized

  • Hannas Accused of Steroid Abuse, Denies Claims

    What better way to spend earrrrrrly Sunday morning than running down Pennsylvania Ave? Well sleeping is cool too, but you can do that any day, while running on the streets of D.C. at other times will probably end with some sort of vehicular injury…depending on how quick you are at dodging cars.

    So this morning I did the Thomas Labrecque Classic, a nice 5K (3.1 mile) run to get the blood flowing at 8 in the morning. My goal heading into the race was to break 22 minutes, a time I have sought after since the first 5K I did 2 years ago.

    Now judging by how well I ran early in the year, that seemed like a bit of a pipe dream, but slowwwwwly but surely I cut into the time barrier and ran a few good races heading into today’s event:

    Laws Run For Shelter: 25:34
    GW Parkway Classic: 24:06
    Vienna Elementary 5K: 22:25
    Race For The Cure: 23:04
    Greene Turtle 5K: 22:34
    Thomas Labrecque Classic: 21:46!
    (the winner was apparently flown in straight from Kenya, finishing around 14:30)

    Which brings into question my training methods. Sure, at this advanced age it’s rare for someone to cut almost 4 minutes off of a 3.1 mile run, but I swear it was all natural. I was fueled by nothing more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Propel fitness water, also known as the lunch of champions and the nectar of the gods.

    Look for some sort of goofy mid-run picture to follow, they usually spring up in the days following the race and always catch you looking like a complete idiot 🙂

    September 17, 2006 running Uncategorized

  • The Price is Wrong Bobby

    On the Price is Right the other day, the contestants were asked to bid on a pair of guitars. The first two bids are normal, 600, 900 dollars. They are followed by some idiot girl who said “I bid 10 hundred Bob.”

    Bob Barker: “What?”
    Idiot girl: “10 Hundred.”

    The audience is losing it, having fully comprehended what the girl said. Bob, either milking the moment or genuinely not hearing her correctly asks for further clarification.

    Bob: “Now wait a minute. What is your bid?”
    Idiot girl (almost screaming): “10 Hundred Bob.”

    865-year-old Bob Barker laughs along with the situation while inside he cringes at what has become of this country. I think he cried himself to sleep that night.

    September 12, 2006 not smart Uncategorized

  • Hate is Such a Strong Word

    I frequent Taco Bell. I have no shame in saying that. Call it what you will. Say the food is terrible, leads to lots of “thinking time,” and is not even authentic Mexican. It is what it is, and I like that.

    I often go with my friend Mike, the man who introduced me to the love of my life…the Mexican pizza.

    Over the past year it has become apparent that Mike has somehow wronged Taco Bell. I say that as if Taco Bell (TB) is a singular entity with somewhat human-like qualities of memory and vengeance.

    Whatever happened, it must have been bad. Did he not pay correctly one time? Did he give on of the workers the stink eye? Did he blaspheme the Bell? We may never know the answer, but the result is clear.

    Ever since the transgression, Mike has had a hard time getting a good meal from TB. I get a cheesy gordita crunch and I get the ranch sauce. He orders one at the same time, no sauce. This has happened at least a dozen times this year, occurring at no fewer than four separate locations.

    Today we went for dinner. I got a Mexican pizza and the aforementioned cheesy gordita crunch, to go. Sauce? Check. Items in a to-go bag? Check.

    Mike gets two cheesy gordita crunches, soft taco, and baja gordita, to go. No sauce on either cheesy gordita crunch. Items come out on a tray, no to-go bag.

    This treatment bothers me, though I’m sure he deserves it. After all, a wonderful entity such as TB doesn’t just hate someone for no reason. So I wrote to Taco Bell asking why it hated my friend. So far, no response. Rest assured, there is some hard thinking going on inside the inner-workings of the TB, weighing how to address a wonderful customer about one that is on the outs. Stay tuned.

    September 5, 2006 Taco Bell Uncategorized

  • Have Your Wave and Eat It Too

    So I’m back from another weekend in Ocean City…only the fourth time this summer…

    Sitting on the beach on Saturday due to some wimpy waves I was able to watch one of the great human battles of all time: Big brother v. Little brother.

    The family was sitting to our left, about three feet closer than us to the water. The sun was shining, the seagulls were gulling, and the two boys in the family were full of energy.

    The older kid grabbed his paddle ball game and made the rounds of his family–dad, mom, grandma, what looked like an aunt and uncle. He asked each one if they would play with him, and despite his pleadings, each one declined to really even acknowledge his existence. Dad didn’t even look up from his book.

    Meanwhile, the little brother had picked up the other paddle and was following big brother around. He asked again and again if he could play the paddle ball game. Seems like an easy solution to both of their problems.

    But older brother wasn’t having any of it. He kept asking the rest of the family, brushing off the little brother as hastily as the uncle did to him.

    “Why won’t you play with me!!!!” The little brother’s question goes unanswered.

    Older brother hits the ball with his paddle, playing all by himself down by the ocean. Little brother sulks for about four seconds, staring off into the ocean contemplating his next move. He goes for making himself happy and forgetting about the older brother’s treatment.

    So little brother goes to the great beach pasttime–digging a big hole. He grabs his plastic, little-brother-sized shovel and sets to work two feet in front of mom. Mom warns him about throwing sand up too high since the on-shore breeze would blow it on other beach-goers.

    Little brother takes heed and settles into his project. He gets a nice two-foot hole going before the tide comes in. One wave brings water to his feet, alerting him to impending doom. He stops digging. Another wave comes in as he stares out into the sea, seemingly begging it to retreat to England, but to no avail. The wave pulverizes his hole, proving that despite what you may have learned on The Simpsons, holes have to natural enemies: Piles, and things that can move piles into holes, such as a wave.

    Some kids would have been devastated, but not little brother. He simply tossed his now obsolete shovel behind mom’s chair, and ran in to join his former enemy, the ocean. He ran right past older brother, who was still hitting a ball to himself, miserable that nobody would play with him.

    August 30, 2006 beach Uncategorized

  • Success is Made Sweeter by Failure

    It’s right about now that I miss having a newspaper column. I wrote every week for two years about whatever I wanted, but nobody ever disagreed strongly enough with me to write an email or a letter to the editor. This might have been that week.

    A few weeks ago, a baseball league for 9 and 10 year olds in Utah held its championship game. With two outs, a runner on third and trailing by one run, the Red Sox had their best player up with one last chance to salvage the game.

    As has been done thousands of times in baseball games all over the world in such situations, the Yankees coach elected to walk the good hitter in order to pitch to someone else. Why face the best player when you can increase your chances of getting outs (now at home, first and second base)?

    Just one problem. The kid coming to bat for the Red Sox is not a strong hitter. Oh, and he’s a cancer survivor.

    The kid strikes out, ending the game and giving the championship to the Yankees. And that’s when the complaints started. Red Sox parents said it was a jerk move that sends the wrong message to kids. They said it was picking on a weak kid, a cancer survivor!, in order to win a game. After all, the kids are just there to have fun, not win at all costs.

    They have their opinion, and that’s fine. In a SI.com poll, 60 percent of respondents agree with the Red Sox parents. I’m in the 40 percent.

    As the great Herman Edwards once said, “You play to win the game.” I understand that it’s a children’s league, but they’re not 5 year-olds. At some point you have to learn that life isn’t perfect, and in order to win somebody has to lose. Isn’t that part of what youth sports is all about? There’s getting out and getting exercise, having fun with your friends, but also lessons about succeeding and failing and how to deal with both of those situations.

    In a few years those kids will be in high school, where they will play for championships…if they even make the team. Sometimes sports isn’t fair. Is the high school coach supposed to take a kid who can’t hit just because of his past? When do you teach the kid that lesson? The night before tryouts?

    Why not lay the groundwork throughout the youth athletic experience. After all, there are lessons in kids sports at every practice and every game as it is, no matter how insignificant those things seem at times.

    Cal Ripken Jr., author of several books on teaching youth sports, said kids need to be exposed to success and failure as part of the process. At some point, he said, the pressure of the whole sports system becomes too great, too emphasized by parents and coaches, and without those lessons, kids are being set up to fail.

    “Before kids really learn how to play, they need to experience the good and the bad, sometimes the positive, sometimes the negative, a little adversity, and they need to learn the game, and they should be allowed to make mistakes,” Ripken said. “When you emphasize winning, those mistakes really aren’t allowed.”

    Red Sox parents said it was an emphasis on winning, at the expense of a fragile kid, that did just the opposite of what Ripken is pushing. But it wasn’t about pitching to a kid with cancer. They weren’t punishing him for his condition. It was about playing the percentages, playing baseball in a championship game. If the Yankees give up a hit to the Red Sox best player, it’s their parents who want the coach’s head on a stake for his bonehead move.

    It’s not like the Red Sox coach, and virtually every other coach in the history of youth baseball doesn’t do something that could make a kid feel bad about himself. What about the fat kid who gets stuck in right field? Or the slow kid who always strikes out who only gets his one at-bat a game?

    Go to any baseball field during little league season and you’ll hear coaches say quite blatantly things like, “He’s not going to hit, just pitch it right in there,” “Infield in, this guy won’t hit it hard,” or “This pitcher’s got nothing, wait for him to walk you.” Or what about the catcher who doesn’t have a strong enough arm to throw out base-stealers? You think those coaches don’t put the steal sign on every pitch?

    Before you go condemning one coach for making a call in a championship game, think about what you’re really against. If you want kids to be sheltered and not have to endure the “harsh” lessons of losing once in a while, take them to the candy store whenever they demand, and give them a trophy for successfully putting on their shoes today. There are no losers there…except when the real world catches up with them, and the first time someone tells them “no.”

    Part of sports is losing. That’s the case in Major League Baseball just the same as it is in little league. Don’t want to expose your kids to losing? Better make them change their favorite team every year lest they not support the World Series Champion.

    The kid who struck out to end the game apparently went home and cried himself to sleep. That’s certainly not something you want every night from a kid. But you know, when I played baseball there were many times where I went to sleep feeling like I could have done better. If only I had gotten another hit. If only I hadn’t dropped that fly ball. If only I hadn’t walked in that go-ahead run when I was pitching. And I was one of the better kids on my teams.

    When I was 13, there was a kid on my team who always played right field. The entire season, I would bet he got no more than 5 hits. But every practice he went out there and swung his heart out and chased down fly balls. Every game he went up there hacking and made it his mission to beat me to every ball in the outfield when I was in center. When he picked up that ball, when he got those five hits, he was ecstatic. His parents cheered. My parents cheered. That smile was bigger every time because of all the other things in between.

    When I got a single, I might have been disappointed I didn’t get a double. It was a matter of perspective. Having hit many doubles before, that letdown made me work harder to do better the next time. But for the right fielder, that single was the taste of success, a function of all those swings at all those practices, that was made sweeter by the 0-for-16 slump he was in before.

    Kids are tough. They don’t like to feel bad, and the good ones will realize early on that sometimes it takes a little extra work to get what you want. That’s the case in this story, a bright spot that some adults could learn from. The kid who struck out said he’s going to practice his hitting, so that next time they’ll walk him to pitch to someone else.

    That’s the kind of response that should come from a disappointing end to your season. I’ll work hard and do better next time. For all the time the boy’s father has spent complaining in the last few weeks, he could have been throwing him a lot of pitches. My arm is fresh if he needs to make a call to the bullpen.

    August 22, 2006 baseball Uncategorized

  • It’s Thinking…

    If you don’t have StumbleUpon, your life is not complete. It has brought hours of wasted time for me and however many other people have come across its brilliance…

    Case in point, the likebetter game. It’s simple. They show you two pictures, and you pick which one you like better. It’s not based on any criteria, just pick which one you like better. After a few selections, the brain icon changes, letting you know that the game knows something about you based on what you selected.

    At first, this thing was dead on, correctly guessing 10 things about me based on my choices. After a while, it was down to getting 2 out of 3 right, but that’s not so bad considering the basic premise.

    It would be interesting to see their algorithm and what they assigned as attributes to certain photos. And I must say that after doing it for a while you start to think about the photos more before making a choice. If I pick the picture of the churchy stained-glass, what are they taking from that? Are they going to say that I’m a conservative? That I’m religious? That I’m into classical art, or things made out of glass? Who knows, but still a good use of a little downtime.

    And if you’re looking for stumble, you have to be using Firefox, not Internet Explorer. Check it out here.

    August 20, 2006 technology Uncategorized
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