National Get Lucky Night

(Click on images for direct link) I try to stay out of my son’s personal non-academic life. Particularly his romantic life. For the parents of a teenager a certain amount of willful ignorance and plausible deniability is bliss. But as certain rites of passage roll around, it’s hard not to engage in a certain level of vicarious voyeurism. One of the biggest milestones is prom. For months we would discretely inquire if he had made prom arrangements, particularly whether or not he had a date yet. After weeks of vague replies it became apparent that he was going to end up going stag. As regular readers will know, my son has a lot more going for him than I did at that age. But he still wasn’t able to close the deal for this year. Part of his reluctance may because he is gun shy. His date to last year’s prom ended up passing out on the dance floor from exhaustion (My son had fed her a full dinner beforehand and no alcohol had been consumed) and had to be rushed to the emergency room. That made the rest of the evening rather awkward. This year, he blames his condition on his own choosiness and the protectiveness of the parents of the girls he knows. His school is nearly one-quarter Asian and the level of the classes he takes tends to skew that percentage even higher. In his Calculus BC class last year, there were only a couple of kids of entirely European heritage. Many of his fellow students are Generation 1 or 1.5 immigrants, meaning they were either born in the US or moved here as small children. They have been raised as Americans with all the cultural adaptations thereunto, but their parents were born and educated abroad and have brought with them a lot of old world attitudes. They are very protective of their daughters, which troubles me with what it reveals of how women are treated in their native culture. Keeping your little girl from going to prom with a guy is unnecessarily strict and in complete defiance of decades of American tradition. But American mass-media bears some responsibility for enhancing these parents’ paranoia. Teen movies before and since John Hughes have focused on prom as the centerpiece of the high school experience. This is the night where all the drama, conflict, and romance of the school year culminate. At movie proms, if there is not a catfight, a romantic clinch, or a baby being delivered, it just hasn’t been a real party. A recent Washington Post article noted the disturbing trend that girls’ expectations for prom invitation have come to exceed the effort most guys put into a marriage proposal. Fueled by silly MTV shows, guys are now expected to come up with unique and romantic methods of asking for a date which puts a lot on the line. If the approach crashes and burns, the guy is now totally exposed and out of the running for discretely moving onto his second choice. No girl wants to be somebody’s back-up plan. It becomes an all-or-nothing proposition. Likewise, guys’ expectations for prom night have also been raised to traditional wedding night levels. Prom has become National Get Lucky Night. Even back in my day there were always rumors of rented motel rooms and all night beach parties where clothes and inhibitions were bound to be abandoned. But today that expectation has risen to ridiculous levels. Since girls don’t even pretend to wait until the wedding night anymore, prom has now become the focal point for even the most demure girls that haven’t crossed the bridge into sexual activity already. In order to fight the perceived perils of prom night many schools are now organizing very elaborate after-prom parties to keep these hormonally charged kids busy until daylight when presumably the risk of procreative activity subsides. I know of one private school that gives away a sports car as a door prize. Never mind that the winner usually has something as good or better in his garage already. Last week we got a mass e-mail from the principal asking parents to not host private after-prom parties since the PTA goes to a lot of trouble and expense to rent out a local mega-fitness center. That’s not my son’s idea of a good time. Instead, he is having a half-dozen (or maybe more) of his equally unlucky in love friends over for a massive video game extravaganza. We are temporarily moving all the available audio-visual outlets to the living room so we can have multiple rounds of Smash Brothers running at once. And isn’t having a good time with your friends to mark a milestone in your high school career what prom night should really be about? BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is prom completely out of control, or am I a victim of fuddy-duddiness? How did your prom compare to the modern version?

Shaking Hands With George

My post a while back about stalking Maureen Dowd was anti-climactic because I never actually met MoDo. At best I got a curious and/or nervous look from here as to why I was taking a pictures. The person I did manage to meet was George Stephanopoulos. Like any celebrity, he is smaller than he appears in television, which is mighty small indeed. Despite his bushy eyebrows, he has never lost that boyish whiz-kid look he had as one of Bill Clinton’s inner circle. Producing his Sunday morning show requires a fair amount of physical energy. The show is recorded in the smaller of the third floor studios of the brand new Newseum right next to a large staircase the runs up and down the height of the building. Right after the Roundtable segment, while the panelists are moseying over to the green room for the web post-interview, George and an assistant race up the stairwell to get to sixth floor for the Weekly Funnies segment. I had been standing outside watching all the guests go by when he came out for the next segment. As he went past, to break the awkwardness of me staring at him, I said, “I really love the show.” I felt like a groupie hanging around the back door of a Hannah Montana concert. He stopped and said “thanks” and continued on up the stairs. Once he gets up to the roof terrace (and these are tall floors), he sets up overlooking the Mall of DC. From there he points out a landmark and introduces the late show comic clips. After that, he does the closing remarks and the show wraps. But that doesn’t mean he is done. I wandered back through the museum looking at some of the exhibits and when I got back down to the third floor I noticed a group hanging outside the door to the studio. I glanced into the studio and saw George sitting at the desk talking to the camera. I wandered over to see what the crowd was for. Before I could find out, the door opened and a guy wearing tons of badges ushered them in and I wagon-trained along. I don’t like looking like a tourist even when I am being one. Even though I had a camera case over my shoulder, I had dressed for the day in pleated khakis and a nice earth-tone button down shirt. I looked positively Al Gore-ish. This group that was on a private tour was also dressed pretty nicely for a Sunday morning in Washington. They turned out to be a group of VIPs from a company that owned several network affiliates. Everybody tip-toed back into the electronics filled back of the studio with all the cables and cameras. In addition to Snuffleupagus (as cruel bloggers call him), there was the guest wrangler and three or four production people. George was doing drop-in interviews with local stations. The producer was on the phone and would tell George who they were going to talk to next. George would then sit there repeating the name and city of the local anchor he was about to talk to. The camera man would count down the feed and then George would turn on the charm. He’d make news-show happy chat with the local newscaster and pimp the panelists and topic for the day’s show which obviously hadn’t aired yet in that market. While I was in there, he talked to LA, Atlanta, and Miami. Between the drop-ins, he would walk out from behind the desk and schmooze with the big wigs. The topic of the day was (and still is) when will Hillary throw in the towel. He would just shrug and reply to the effect of “when she is good and ready.” I tried to stay as inconspicuous as possible. As he came around shaking hands and being introduced to everyone, it became inevitable that he would reach me. I just stuck out my hand and introduced myself. He said, “That’s right, we met outside.” He had remembered me from the hallway. Once all the on-air promotions were done, the tour continued on over to the master control room, but I ducked out the other direction before anyone could notice me and call security. The whole time I was there, George was nothing but polite and professional to everyone. That included senators, news columnists, corporate guests, and me, a nosey blogger that had wandered in off the street. Say what you want, but I say George Stephanopolous is a class act. BlatantCommentWhoring™: When have you wandered into someplace you didn’t belong and were you caught?

Cooking Mama Mothers Day

Rather than go the flowers route or get yet more candy for the house, I did all my Mothers Day shopping at BigBoxOfElectronics. This is not as self-serving and clueless as it seems. My wife enjoys lots of little gadgets. She's the one that decided we were getting GPS units for Christmas. I claim that I have no need for one since I am never truly lost. She argues that when the GPS says "Turn around as soon as possible." that it is very politely telling me to catch a clue. That is just one example. The house is littered gizmos and gadgets that even I think is overboard. Nonetheless, I decided that more gizmos and gadgets were just the ticket. A nice mini-USB hub would go great with her laptop and I also got a 5-in-1 memory card reader for use with her digital camera. BigBoxOfElectronics is also BigBoxOfMusicAndMovies. She just bought herself the new Neil Diamond album, so that was out. Then in the movie aisle I saw a box set of Audrey Hepburn movies. I had never seen the original Sabrina and we both love Roman Holiday, so that went into the cart. I wandered into the gaming area looking for WiiFit. Normally, any gift implying the need for exercise is a risky gambit. But she had mentioned it as something she was interested in and the hosts of Buzz Out Loud says that that is the free pass needed. Lucky for me, WiiFit doesn't come out for another two weeks. Not wanting to go away empty handed, I threw a game into the basket called Cooking Mama Cook-Off. When I showed the gifts to my son, he decided that this was the perfect game for him to give. He declared it doubly ironic since she doesn't play video games or cook. He's made it a running joke that his mother doesn't cook. That's not true. She just hasn't cooked in his living memory. It's not that she can't cook. She has just managed to trick me into it. When she was a first year teacher, she asked if I could help out by cooking meals to free up time for her to write lesson plans. I asked if this would just last a year or two until she had a good stockpile of lessons. She just smiled ambiguously. That was twelve years ago. The game is a lot of fun. You have to prepare meals by doing all the different steps to prepare a recipe with the WiiMote. There is cutting, peeling, stirring, pouring, stir-frying, and all sorts of other esoteric procedures. Cracking eggs takes a pretty delicate touch. Like most Wii games it seems designed to induce carpal tunnel injuries in the most efficient manner possible. To give the game a spin, my son and I used the head-to-head challenge mode. While he easily won the minestrone and custard rounds, I rocked at mochi. And when I looked up, my wife had quietly snuck out of the room. I think all the waving of the WiiMotes looked too much like real work to her. So I will just have to become the master chef on the Wii as well as in the kitchen. BlatantCommentWhoring™: In your house, who does the cooking and who plays games? BonusBlatantCommentWhoring™: On a scale of vacuum cleaner to diamond ring, how inappropriate were my gifts?

Confessions Of A Bad Son

I’m not a very good son. I tease and torment my mother every chance I get. Many of my run-ins with her date back to my college days. Part of the problem was that in my sophomore year, my family got transferred to Italy and that made communicating more trouble than just picking up the phone. She wanted frequent letters and I would get behind. She once sent me an entire book of stamps with no note or explanation. I wrote back explaining that I could buy my own stamps. She wrote back smugly that at least it got me to write. Another time she had sent me a copy of Space by James Michener because one of the main characters was a Georgia Tech grad. The book was truly dreadful and I wrote a ten page letter explaining in excruciating detail just how bad it was. Rather than be impressed with the effort I had put into the analysis, she took it as a personal attack on her and broke down into tears. Yet another letter from me was a long rambling April's Fools joke hinting that I wasn’t who I thought I was and that my whole life had been a lie. I was going to break up with my fiance because I needed to find myself and women just didn't interest me anymore. She completely missed the April 1st date on the letter and called international long distance to make sure I was okay. I could hear my dad in the background saying, “I knew he was just joking.” That led into another running gag. My college roommate was gay (see this post for that story) and when my mother would visit us, she would pick up a slight tingle in her fairly unreliable gaydar. Anytime she hinted that my roommate might be a little light in the loafers I reacted in feigned ignorance. I would deny it and kept insisting that it was all part of her over active imagination. I kept that game going for several years. I just loved playing on her trust and gullibility. I don’t know why, it was just fun to do. And it’s not that she has ever been a bad mother. Twice she has had to emulate a single parent for a year while my dad was on assignment overseas. The first time was with toddlers. The second with teenagers. I’m not sure which was worse. I still like to tease her when I can. I make fun of her bland New England cooking. I blame my bad driving habits on her easily frightened reactions while she was teaching me. I tell her that her 85-year-old neighbor with artificial knees is faster than she is (because it’s true). I tease because I love. BlatantCommentWhoring™: What have you done mean to your mother?

Impractical Auto Advice

For a while in high school I had one of the most distinctive cars in the student lot. My dad had bought himself a 1973 VW SuperBeetle (the major distinguishing feature that made it Super seemed to be a slightly rounded windshield rather than a flat windscreen). Since he carpooled to work, the car became my de facto school commuter. When people saw the Orange Pumpkin in the lot, they knew I was near. While I don't have any contemporary pictures of that fine automobile, this one from the web is an identical twin, except for the lack of dented fenders. As a junior, I didn't have the right to park in the paved lot, but instead had to park in the wooded area down by the football stadium. Over the months the flared fenders kept scraping trees and becoming slightly banged up, much to my dad's annoyance. There was as least one fender I had no idea when or how the dent happened. The worst was when I backed into a tree and wrinkled the rather flimsy bumper. SuperBeetles have some well-known drawbacks. The engine is lightly powered and the heater is laughable. For suburban driving in Florida where the streets are flat, the speed limits all 40 or under and the weather never went below 30, all these problems were moot. Perhaps the only down side to this nearly indestructible car was that the gas gauge didn't work. As a part time employee at SquareBurgerChain, my paychecks were mostly in the $20 to $30 range, meaning a full tank of gas AND a movie ticket were budget busters. I would lose track of the last time I put gas in and how much, which resulted in the occasional roadside flame out. I became quite adept at getting the fuel system filled and primed again. Now as a nearly useless public service I share that advice: How To Restart A 1973 Pumpkin Orange VW SuperBeetle That Has Run Out Of Gas Because Of A Faulty Gas Gauge And Negligence On The Part Of A Broke High School Student. Beg a ride to a gas station from a classmate or family member. (Remember, cell phones did not exist in 1981.) Buy one gallon of gasoline and dispense into portable slightly rusted gas can. Return to shoulder of road where VW has been left. Fill tank with one-half gallon of gas from portable container. Gas must make its way to the engine. Wait eight hours for gas to siphon through fuel system. OR Have fellow student or family member crank starter while liberally splashing gasoline into carburetor. Step back once engine has started. Pour remaining gasoline into fuel tank while engine idles. Proceed to gas station. Pump five dollars or five gallons of gas, whichever is greater, into car. Note odometer reading. Make mental note to buy an additional five dollars of gas within 100 miles. Bonus advice: Occupancy of a VW Beetle by six or more people for any distance further than the student parking lot to the nearest fast food restaurant is not recommended. This is a time-tested proven-effective method perfected over a good half dozen incidents. Fortunately most occurred near the driveway or on local roads with wide shoulders. Eventually my dad sold the bug for a 1972 Pontiac LeMans Grand Prix station wagon for its boat-towing capability, a feature no Beetle I know of had. The station wagon was a sadly faded puke-pea green with peeling faux-wood paneling trim. It was much more practical but far less distinctive. To this day, when I see an orange classic VW puttering down the road, I sigh nostalgically and hope that somewhere that Bug I drove is still coughing to a start and running out of gas. BlatantCommentWhoring™: What sort of impractical auto advice can you offer? Photo Credit: Found the doppleganger to my Bug, as well as many others, here.

A Series Of Tubes

I don’t spend a lot of time on this blog bragging about my son. It’s not that there’s not a lot to brag about, but because I remember how embarrassing it was to me to have my mother talk me up to people I didn’t even know. And what is a blog but talking to hundreds of strangers in the grocery store check-out lane all at once. But I have several things to be proud of even if I can’t take credit. About two years ago he became fascinated with the concept of carbon nanotubes. These things did not even exist when I was in college. Think of a sheet of paper rolled into a tube, only the paper is a one atom thick slice of graphite. Carbon nanotubes are so new they don’t even know what can be done with them yet. Having finished up most of the courses he needed to graduate last year, he got interested in the school’s intern mentorship program. High school students get paired up with people in industry or commerce. He put down carbon nanotubes as his interest. At the beginning of the year he was told there was a chance to work with a researcher that was doing just that. For the entire school year he has been putting in ten hours a week doing real lab work for a real PhD doing real research. Carbon nanotubes are small and finicky and delicate. He spent a lot of time cleaning glassware, preparing solutions, waiting endlessly for the centrifuge to work its nano-magic and logging raw data. Some of it was boring and tedious, but so are a lot of things. Overnight, he upgraded his wardrobe from black denim and ironic tee shirts to twill pants and golf shirts. He would come home some days later than me from having to fight traffic from all the other enclaves of Really Smart People that lie between DC and Baltimore. He never lost his sense of humor or his relaxed attitude to schoolwork that bored him. We had a few bumps along the year, but he is now in the senioritis strewn back stretch and it looks like he might make it. Someday nanotubes may make the saying that the internet is just a bunch of tubes more than a misguided metaphor. And my son had some small, small part of it. He may not continue on with this field, but the skills and exposure he has gotten will serve him well in the future. I may even be bragging about him more in the weeks to come. But only because he deserves it so much. Indulge me because I only get to do this once and it’s too exciting to not stop people in the street and tell them how proud I am of my son.

Colon-oscopy

I hadn't done any memes or quizzes lately mostly because I haven't seen any decent ones lately. Just endless variations of the "Tell (some absurdly large number) Silly/Embarrassing/Extortionable Facts About You." But then comes Claude of Baltimore Diary to the rescue with What Punctuation Mark Are You? These silly "What [blank] Are You?" quizzes are you can be very clever or astoundingly obtuse (Which Next Generation Klingon Are You?). Besides, punctuation is always funny. Many, many places on the web I've gotten into absurd little discussions about gross abuses of punctuation marks. The poor apostrophe seems to be the most critically mistreated. Put in all sorts of places he never belongs and left out of many respectable places he should. So I nervously took the quiz to see what punctuation mark I would be. You Are a Colon You are very orderly and fact driven. You aren't concerned much with theories or dreams... only what's true or untrue. You are brilliant and incredibly learned. Anything you know is well researched. You like to make lists and sort through things step by step. You aren't subject to whim or emotions. Your friends see you as a constant source of knowledge and advice. (But they are a little sick of you being right all of the time!) You excel in: Leadership positions You get along best with: The Semi-Colon What Punctuation Mark Are You? Not as exciting as an exclamation mark or as necessary as a period, but still, a colon is good solid piece of punctuation. Colons are authoritative. They perform many important functions: beginning lists, introducing quotes, and separating the halves of an appositive. The only unfortunate feature is that the name is shared with a portion of the digestive system which can result in silly scatological puns. But the colon isn't the only punctuation mark with that problem. Try do discuss periods in a middle school language arts class without getting a few snickers. I do have to take exception to the last statement of the quiz explanation. I refuse to have anything to do with semi-colons. Kurt Vonnegut (he said it, I believe it) called semi-colons pretentious: If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. Gawker even declared the semi-colon dead. Colons divide: semi-colons dither. BlatantCommentWhoring™: Take the quiz and 'fess up.

Drunken De Maio

I don't do many diary style blog posts but today wans;t a typical day. I woke wup at 6:30 this morning wanting, no needeing, to go on a bciylce ricde. This was my firest time down to Ellic0tt City for the biking season. I love screaming down Main street in excess of 25 miles per hour and then having to make the hard right from Main Street onto New Cut Road and climbing out of the saddle to begin the two mile uphill ride back to Montgomery Roaad. I put 16 miles on the odometer which pushed me over 100 miles for the year so far. I keep a pretty detailed log of my rides and I tend to sandbag the first ride or two each yera on a specivic route. I checked my rather anal-retentive records and saw that this ride beat my best time for that route from all of last year. Yay, me. I credit the new bike shoes and pedals that my wife gave me for Christmas. I get a lot more power going up hills. I'm still not used to stepping out of the pedals at stops so I tend to run more red lighst than I should, which makes me the sort of discourteous rider that motorists hate. Trust me, at that time of day, I'm not risking too many squealing breaks. When I got home it was time to figure out why the computer in the den no longer connected to the wireless network in the basement. I dusted off a Belkin Wireless network extender I had bought and never got working right. This time I found a website whti tips on how to get into the web interface embeedded in the router rather than the through the useless interface program. I got it working and syncing, but no help for the computer. That meant a trip down to BigBoxOfElectronics to buy a new wirelless network card. The original was D-Link but when I had FiOS installed, it wasn't strong enough to hook to the wimpy router/moden that Verizon gives. About six months I decided to go name brand and got a Linksys card that was doing fine, but has been slowly decaying. After perusing the choices, I went back to D-Link because their new 802.11n card had two antennas and gave me an upgrade path just in case Verizon ever decided to support that standard. The card went in without a hitch and immediately found the network extender. Since I was futzing with the network already, I went ahead and chabged from WEP to WPA security since all the other wireless networks in my neighborhood use that. Peer pressure is a bitch. Then it was time to get ready for not one, but two Cinco Di Maio parties. The first was at a coworker's of my wife who is the PE teacher at one of the schools she works at. Not to traffic in stereotypes, but.... well, nevermind. She throws great parties with a delightful cross-section of poeple. The second party was at my bosses house. I tagged along on the hosue tour and she has a wood shop that puts my son's middle school technical arts wing to shame. So I managed to drive the two or three miles home without attracting any law enforcement attention. Normally I edit my posts in Microsoft Word and get rid of amy typos and missspellings, but tonight I feel very stream of consciousnness and will see in the morning just how embarrassing this post is. BlatantCommentDismissing(tm): Really, I was fine enough to drive. Just nto sober enough to blog.