Parking lot effervescence

I am in my truck, about to turn on the engine, ready to leave the parking lot of Whole Foods when I hear, coming from the car alongside mine, a pounding on the window. An old old man with a substantial beard is obviously asking that I roll down the window. I do so. And so we talk:

u: Excuse me, but I just wanted to know. You have a sticker on the back of your car with the letters MV. What does it stand for?
n: It could actually be many things: Mini Van (for it is indeed a minivan), Mercury Villager (it is that as well), Martha’s Vineyard..

u: Naturally. It could also be Moravia.
n: Are you from Moravia (there is a tinge of an accent there)?

u: Me? Moravia? No, no.. so which is it? What does it stand for?
n: I picked it up long ago on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. So where are you from if not Moravia?

u: Italy. But I have lived in Madison for 46 years. But I am from Milano.
n: I love that place, you know! Just got back from a trip there this summer..

u: Yes, but you would go nuts if you lived there. Here, in America, you wait two months to get your tax refund back. In Italy? Maybe three years. If you’re lucky!
n: But you have now had a prime minister in place for longer that at any time since World War II -- two years!

u: And he’s a bastard! Listen, I don’t travel there anymore because it is so humiliating to go in a plane these days. I don’t like it. They treat you like animals.
n: What’s your name, btw? I’m nc.

u: I’m uc. (we shake hands through our car windows) I am the only physics professor on the faculty here who does not have a Ph.D.! Of course, I am now retired..

And so it continued for a long while. I could hear myself laughing louder and louder. I thought of inviting him to dinner some day. God, Italians are friendly.

Notes from the tail end of a summer season

One evening, many realities:

I am amazed at my previous posts. Newspaper links? With political overtones? What has become of this Ocean blog? Let me compensate by flipping the channel back to the here-and-now of this particular blogger’s take on life: I had in a five-hour evening stretch no fewer than five encounters (email and face-to-face) that positively shook me to the core. And so, to deal expressively with the onslaught of drama, I decided to look on the Internet for a translation of a genuinelly mournful Polish poem. I did not succeed, but trust me, it's beautiful and full of pathos and drama, in the truest Eastern European fashion. Searching for poetry on the Net is a good distraction -- I would recommend it to anyone in the (momentary, because if it's enduring, go see a shrink instead) depths of despair.

Next morning, looking to others:

I visited the blogs of people I know who live in far away places. One such person resides on the Virgin Islands. She hasn’t posted in the past few days and I would be concerned that she has suffered as a result of the hurricanes, but on the other hand she comes in and out of contact, occasionally sending messages such as this:

A.W.O.L.*
*Apathetic While On Liquor
Okay.So I've been drinking instead of posting for the last month.

An ordinary person might worry when they see a note like this. Not me. She explained that rum is cheaper than water on the islands and so life sometimes takes her in that direction. Hmmm. Not exactly a cheerful route, but definitely interesting.

I also got some interesting mail from my pals in Kyoto who had been traveling in the US this past month. They write: “Thank you for telling us about American air conditioning. I took a warm shirt. My friend did not and had to buy one it was so cold.” See (Tonya!), it’s not only me. Others find this to be a chilly nation as well.

Finally, looking outside, I am in love with the bright crisp fall day. By contrast, someone said this yesterday about living in New York: “the air is so stale that even if I open all doors and windows I cannot get enough of the fresh stuff.” Now, I happen to like the particular smell that belongs to New York. It’s a combination of subway-air-creeping-up-through-the-grillwork, food stands, vents from air conditioning units and the East River. But, looking out now at the Madison sky, I am thinking that I am not appreciative enough of the Fall season in the Midwest. So, count this as a note of deep appreciation and great joy at being able to go out and sit in my favorite outdoor spot and look at the fall flowers and take in a whiff of that clear crisp air (I will choose to ignore the fact that this particular neighborhood is less than pristine as it rests on a landfill, but whatever you want to say about the garbage of the previous generation, all those additives and preservatives certainly have made the trees grow with great abandon).

Each year these come back to liven up the end of the summer 

In contrast to the busy bee, this one is so lethargic, she can hardly find the center of the flower. 

At least two people I know will remember this poem: "..the rose is out of town." 

Behind the Times

Yes, I admit it, I did not read this op-ed article in the NYTimes until today. I am certain most regard it as a dated thing of the past (it is from the week-end), but in case you, like me, are behind in every aspect of life at the moment, you may have missed the Brooks-ian analysis of who is voting D versus R this year. What is neat about reading with a delay is that you can immediately click onto responses (full text here) to the article. I am including fragments of the Brooks piece and snippets from the four letters published a few days later. Emphases are my own.

From Brooks:

There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.

C.E.O.'s are classic spreadsheet people. According to a sample gathered by PoliticalMoneyLine in July, the number of C.E.O.'s donating funds to Bush's campaign is five times the number donating to Kerry's.

Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people and lean Democratic. Eleven academics gave to the Kerry campaign for every 1 who gave to Bush's. Actors like paragraphs, too, albeit short ones. Almost 18 actors gave to Kerry for every 1 who gave to Bush. For self-described authors, the ratio was about 36 to 1. Among journalists, there were 93 Kerry donors for every Bush donor. For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1.

… Accountants, whose relationship with numbers verges on the erotic, are now heavily Republican. Back in the early 1990's, accountants gave mostly to Democrats, but now they give twice as much to the party of Lincoln.

…[as for academics:] University of California employees make up the single biggest block of Kerry donors …All but 1 percent of the campaign donations made by employees of William & Mary College went to Democrats. In the Harvard crowd, Democrats got 96 percent of the dollars. At M.I.T., it was 94 percent. Yale is a beacon of freethinking by comparison; 8 percent of its employee donations went to Republicans.

Readers’ comments:

[from Mass:] … It seems to me that the statistics show a correlation between education and political support regardless of numeracy or literacy. The fact that corporate chief executives and accountants are more likely to support George Bush is consistent with this observation: they are probably best educated that a third of his tax cuts go to the richest 1 percent.

[from a Yale astronomy prof:]… David Brooks classifies professors as "paragraph people." But even here at Yale, an institution known for its focus on humanities and arts, the majority of the faculty are scientists, medical doctors or involved with economics or business.

Our non-teaching duties involve fund-raising, personnel management and gigabytes of data, not unlike other "spreadsheet people."

Why, then, is the professoriate so united behind John Kerry (far more so than we were for previous Democratic candidates)?

Perhaps because teaching and research require open-mindedness, reasoning from facts rather than from ideology, nuanced interpretation of complex situations, and the ability to change one's mind - all traits that the Bush team has displayed less of than any administration in my lifetime.

[from a sociology prof and a management consultant:] While "spreadsheet people'' may be Republicans by and large, George W. Bush is not a spreadsheet person; his fiscal policy cannot withstand a quantitative analysis.

Nor is he a paragraph person - one could not find the prose to justify his conflation of Iraq with the war on terror. So what is President Bush?

David Brooks's framework leaves out an important group, what we label the PowerPoint or bullet-point people.

Bullet-point people traffic in the meaningless business-speak of the management consultant, language that eschews equally the nuance and hard numbers of reality...

[from Atlanta:] ...Academia is full of very smart people earning very little money relative to what they could earn. They are curious people, dedicated to pursuing the truth and teaching others.
Business is full of very smart people whose sole responsibility is to make money, for stockholders and themselves. The first group supports Democrats. The second group supports Republicans. Draw your own conclusion.

W on doctors...and love

Thanks to the pal who send me the following clip. After this morning's press tirade about Kerry and the Packers (see post below), this is a welcome antidote. Do click on it -- it's not a propaganda piece, just a little slice of a real newsclip.

From MSNBC (give it a minute to load after you click on it and choose movie media setting if a screen doesn't automatically pop up or else you'll miss the wonderful moment of stunned confusion on the part of the newscaster):

obgyn.wmv

Goat-mail

Here I am, in the middle of the month, in the middle of the day. Perfect time to respond to some emails, especially from those who are forever doubting the veracity of some of my statements.

1. Re: Fiona Apple: I now know who she is! No need to make fun of me there. I’ve known for a while, actually. Someone once gave me a CD of hers in one of their many attempts to educate me in the music of the last two centuries.

2. Re: On where to throw your money if you have no idea how to spend money and still want to show your support of this free blog: when I proposed “Save the Goat” I meant it! And I would not have suggested it had I myself not done things to support the Goat. Alright, so initially I got interested in it because of the quirky name. I like goats. I like several people who call themselves goats. Goats are good. Then, having inquired about saving THE Goat, I found that it is a legitimate effort to create a protected area out of the Goat River Valley in British Columbia. Studying the literature has instilled a great urge in me to go there and explore it myself. What’s stopping me?

- There’s quite a bit of logging going on there (hence the problem), but there are limited blogging opportunities: the region doesn’t seem to have WiFi. I’m not sure it has much in the way of electrical outlets either. The amazing red cedar trees appear to be completely unwired.

- Bears: the materials state: “As this is bear country, hikers should educate themselves on bear safety and practice bear-safe camping to avoid confrontations.” CONFRONTATIONS? What does that mean? Further, I read: “Hikers can camp on gravel bars along the river. A few sites have bear poles with hoisting poles.” What on earth is that all about? You hoist bears on poles? What?

- Safety issues in general: The whole thing sounds fraught with dangers. For example, I read: “After crossing a logging bridge over the Milk River [‘Goat’ and ‘Milk’! How cute! No wonder I was initially charmed!], the trail follows the Goat River upstream for 4 km, where a cable car ferries hikers across the river. Use the cable car at your own risk; it is potentially hazardous.” And if you get hurt? “The Goat River Valley is a wilderness area and access to emergency services is extremely limited. Hikers must be self-sufficient…”

Does anyone else think that this sounds positively terrifying? Still, it’s the Goat…

My correspondence with the Goat people up in B.C. 

Let’s count the number of ways this article insults Wisconsinites

Possibly in anticipation of Kerry’s visit to Madison today, the Washington Post ran a story (again!) on Kerry’s fumble over the name of the Packer stadium. Perhaps you should skip this one (here) if you do not want to suffer acute frustration and anger at the paper for feeding into the Wisconsin stereotype with such gusto:

This is a place where Packers jackets often outnumber sports coats in church [WP emphasis] and thousands of fans wear a big chunk of yellow foam cheese atop their head with the pride of a new parent. President Bush's warning to terrorists is apropos to the passions of Packers fans -- you are either with 'em or against 'em.

I got news for the news writers: I’m neither with ‘em or against ‘em, in fact I don’t know much about ‘em. And I doubt that I stand alone [n.b. the article states that the race is so tight in Wisconsin that even a few thousand votes may make or break a candidate (remember 'a few thousand in 2000'? That was our final count in favor of Gore)].

And here’s another paragraph that just packs it in to Wisconsinites:

Not only did he [Cheney] speak to the biggest issue in the state -- the Packers [nc emphasis]-- he did so with Bart Starr, the Hall of Fame quarterback, by his side. "I've never been around someone I was more impressed with," Starr said of Cheney.

I suppose that I have to take heart in the final paragraph (forgetting the fact that, by inserting that last little jibe at the end, the paper plays right into GWB’s desire to make big of something so trivial), which throws it all up to the stars – both the ones on the field and the ones up above. Here is the key predictor of who will be the next president:

In the end, it's the Packers' score -- more than the Packers vote -- that could determine Kerry's fate. In the past 18 presidential elections, if the Redskins lost or tied the last game before the election, the party in the White House lost, too. The Redskins' opponent Oct. 31: the Packers, but not at Lambert, er, Lambeau Field.

A Personal Call from the Democrats

There was an urgent message on my machine when I got home: "Tomorrow: Kerry! At the Alliant Center! He will be there! We would like to know if you can come. Please give us a call so that we can coordinate.”

Coordinate what?? Is this a personal invitation? Is it like being a delegate to the convention? Do I get to be in the front rows, applauding wildly (is it because they heard my loud cheers on Karaoke night yesterday?)? Do I act as a protector of the Kerry spirit, boo-hissing loud protesters, interveners and disrupters of the democratic process? Do I act as body guard too, jumping up to shield him from rowdy types that occasionally leap to the stage (did they read my post of outrage at the Barrymore for not carrying out a rowdy type from last week’s concert?)? How SPECIAL am I anyway?

Not very, I’m afraid. I’ll go there and I will be just one of thousands. They will have called every listed democrat this side of Milwaukee. I did this for Clinton and Gore when they rolled into Madison. I was a face in the crowd.

For a minute, I had believed that I was on their hot list. Then I remembered the size of my contribution to the party and reality set in.

The Kid in me

There are a number of bloggers who will provide excellent recaps of last night’s gathering of sociologists and tag-alongs at the Karaoke Kid (later in the day you may check here, here and here). I will not be one of them. I am about the last person on earth who should ever write about Karaoke. I never pay attention to rock groups and artists any more and it took me a long time to understand that a reference to Fiona Apple was not a comment about a brand of fruit from the Farmers' Market. But since I pick up songs easily, even as I am not listening to them, I do know words and melodies to the strangest collection of songs and so the urge to join up at the Kid is always strong. But no summaries: I do not know who sang what and when – it’s all a blur of TV monitors and different combinations of people standing up, sometimes falling down and dying (yes, there was a reenactment of a death performed with painful accuracy by the author of JFW), often singing with eyes closed as if their (okay, our) life depended on it.

So how is it that this pop-cultural ignoramus gets herself to the Kid so faithfully and shamelessly each time the trumpet sounds? Well, isn’t there an ancient song out there about Fools Rushing In Where Wise Men Never Go?

Two bloggers and a blogger mom 

Meetings, meetings, more meetings

I have been asked to chair a university committee (I’ve sat on this committee for a number of years now). I have never been asked to be chair of a university-wide committee before. I will be leading the group into making important decisions affecting dozens of students and costing the university hundreds of thousands of dollars each year (judging by the age of the retiring chair, this job is FOR LIFE!). I was expecting to be flown out for a retreat and training session – perhaps to Colorado? Don’t universities do that for people who will be making very important decisions affecting the lives and budgets of so many? I have looked daily in my campus mail, but no such invitation has been forthcoming. Only my schedule of committee meetings. Tomorrow afternoon I begin my official duties. I am thinking that my first action as chair should be to upgrade the snacks and food provided for the afternoon. The beverages in Styrofoam cups have to go! And no more packaged cookies either. Let's set some standards here. We are not just a rinky-dink school; we are part of a world-class university. We need to start learning how to display our worth!

Running from running

I’d fallen into the habit of saying “I no longer run. You know, it’s not very good for you, especially once you’re past your twenties and thirties.” Walking briskly? Yes, I can get fanatically committed to a daily trek around town. But rare is the day that I run, even though less than a year ago, I would enjoy the runner’s high as much as the next young marathoner out there.

Today I no longer can justify my running abstinence. The papers are reporting the findings of a Yale study (for example here) that whips my excuse right out the door. It appears that older runners (past 50 – I qualify!) are even more likely to improve their running performance during training than younger runners (take THAT you baby sprinters!). The researchers are concluding that whatever innards you have that are conducive to running (the article uses more medically precise words, such as musculature, oxygen absorption, etc etc) do not deteriorate or atrophy as a result of aging. They wilt and wither because people do not use them. In simple words: we get lazy.

One researcher notes:
“You can maintain a very high performance standard into the sixth or seventh decade of life.”

At least this gives me an excuse to put off training for a few more months or even years. What’s the rush? I can still improve my running time a quarter of a century from now.

Travel stories

Some people are lucky enough to have NYT travel stories coincide nicely with their time of travel to a featured destination. I had friends who were like that – perhaps even with an inside track to the desk of the main travel editor, because the minute they said they were going to, say, Kenya, bingo! The next week you’d see a story on Kenya in the Sunday paper.

My luck runs in the opposite direction. The minute I come back from a vacation, it is featured and described in loving detail, with supporting references to restaurants, museums and recent important events. Indeed, today I see that the Sophisticated Traveler is featuring Orvieto in Italy. I went to Orvieto in Italy in August. I blogged about it. I took inept pictures of it. [I say inept because even though I thought them to be decent at the time, they were nothing, NOTHING like those in the Times today. Curious? Check this link.] I suppose I can have the satisfaction of saying "hey, I picked it first!" -- as if anyone's listening. I guess that's what blogs are for.

Did I really eat three dozen desserts?

In an earlier post, I asked what fool would take on the judging responsibilities in a dessert-making contest in one’s neighborhood. Of course, in the end, I did agree to do it and, along with two co-judges, I picked what appeared to be the all-around best entry.

Reactions from the non-winners? One neighbor came up and explained that hers was an old and treasured recipe, passed on through generations, and it was okay that it didn’t win since it had already received accolades and praise and recognition elsewhere. Another wondered if I had had a chance to sample all layers of her creamy concoction, since there were surprise elements throughout, all the way to the delicious bottom of the dish. Finally, a child asked if my name card, which said “Hi, I’m Nina” with the scribbled line underneath “I can be bribed” was for real or whether I was joking (I assured him that it was for real). Unfortunately that attempt at humor was severely tested when it turned out that I had picked as number one (a cheesecake with a yin-yang fruit jelly design) the dessert made by immediate neighbor, a person on whom I rely for countless small favors throughout the year.

Other highlights from the evening include finding out that my block is less politically mixed than I had imagined. There’s hope! And yet another surprise – yes, there are others who think it great fun to sit on plastic chairs in the middle of a (blocked off) street until 2:30 a.m. speculating if we were doing in life what we had, in our youthful dreams, imagined we would want to do.

Thanks, J & J, for holding them back so that we could give time and attention to this very serious matter  

Third prize: obviously cheese and berries did well in this contest 

Second prize: chocolate, with raspberries from the back-yard