Ted, Ted, Ted

I try not to be surprised when an amateur comes up with a better how-to guide than I’ve done in a while.

I usually don’t go in for April Fool’s kind of stuff, but this is moderately funny, in a mildly geeky way.

This is currently the best site on the web. (It acceded to the position after this one abdicated recently.)

Hear hear.

The Boston Globe today:

Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at Americas highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.

When I was a white teen, by golly, you had to get into your not-so-selective institution by your own bootstraps.

One’s blog is supposed to be all about whining about the details of one’s personal life, so here you go: I’ve been playing soccer at noon once a week with some of my co-workers, and while a good soccer game is about as much fun as a boring hockey game, that’s still a pretty fair reading on the fun scale, and we have a good soft field that’s easy on the knees, so I’ve stuck with it for about a year now. When I was growing up there were no sport seasons like we have here; it was all soccer, all year round. Soccer was it. I was horrible at it, and as a result I adopted early on the persona of the horrible-at-all-sports geeky kid. Having been thus permanently emotionally scarred, I assumed returning to this most boring yet demanding of all games after almost 30 years would be a chore, something I’d have to psych myself up for, like running or going to the gym. (I did go to a gym once, for about six months right before Laura was born, with the idea of pumping up my upper body for those kid-carrying stresses, but that’s the only time I’ve ever achieved the requisite motivation to do anything like that. All those muscles are, needless to say, long gone, except for those vaguely pyramidal ones at the base of the neck that make me look a little more bullet-headed than I actually feel. Those are probably kept strong by the constant looking up from the computer screen to blink in the glare of day.) But soccer turns out to be a blast. I even bought a cheap pair of cleats, my first ever, to help me stop quicker. (Starting faster, at my speed, is a losing proposition, so I didn’t even count that into the equation.)

So three weeks ago in the middle of a soccer game, I got a feeling like someone had thrown a rock and hit me in the back of the lower leg. Turned out I had pulled one of those muscles that only reveal their central importance to your life when you hurt them. The calf muscle, when it goes out, does so abruptly, with a sensation that reminds you of a rubber band breaking. Your legs go out from under you, and you fall down and roll picturesquely across the lawn until your momentum dissipates. I had to have my friend Ian drive me home after the game because I couldn’t work the gas pedal. (Which was pretty interesting in itself, as Ian hadn’t driven a manual transmission for over a decade. My bullet-head muscles got a nice workout.)

Ice, elevation, etc. You don’t spend a lot of time sitting around when you have two active kids, but I tried to maximize that time. I skipped the next week’s soccer game and swam some laps instead. Yesterday I felt pretty good, so I wrapped the leg, hydrated myself to a comical degree, stretched, warmed up slowly, stretched, took a double dose of Ibuprofen, and stretched. I had a great game, the injured muscle feeling great, until, about halfway through the hour, the identical muscle in the other leg went pop. I did about three yards on the ground, a new personal best. The older injury is even better today — the game seems to have worked it out just enough. So I’m only limping on one side, not both.

This and this, taken together, are about the coolest thing I have seen on the Web in months.

Here’s what I’ve been forgetting to report on: A couple of weeks ago our friends Henry and Mark went around town picking up discarded Christmas trees, and invited us all to watch them burn at Ocean Beach after dark. (The trees, not Mark and Henry. They’re both married. [Welcome to the land of jokes gotten only by catechism class survivors.]) We brought some hot dogs and drinks and had a regular spectacle. Those things go up like a pile of firecrackers. (The trees, not the hot dogs. [Welcome to the land of writers who are so lazy they would rather just pile on the brackets than make properly structured sentences.]) It was beautiful, but watching those sparks fly made me glad we’ve switched to a boring old artificial tree at our house.

We have cut our total co-op memberships down to one (the biodiesel coop) from a high of three last year (that one plus the food co-op and the preschool co-op). I’ve been in co-ops forever, and the one thing they have all had in common is the net expensiveness of the product they offer, both in raw dollar terms and in the wads of time they require. I went into all those memberships consciously, and got all I wanted from them and more, but I have to say it’s going to be nice saving some money and having some free time during this period of low co-op involvement, however long it lasts. Adam Kotsko was writing about it this morning:

I confess that the other day I went to Europa Books and saw that they were selling Sein und Zeit for over $50. Telling Ted about this, I mentioned, “I think it’s cheaper at the Co-op,” then realized that that may well have been the first time I — and perhaps anyone in history — had ever used the phrase “cheaper at the Co-op.”

Of course I don’t think any such thing — standard schmandard, that’s what I say — but this quiz sure did peg me. I am from exactly those two places (among others) and I did say “pop” until I moved to New York, where nobody knows that that means.

I couldn’t help observing, though, that it’s very likely that if I were African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American or anything else besides the whitest of white bread, this would be completely useless to me. I wonder about that.

I met the software architect for this cool Web 2.0 company at a staff party for one of the schools Mary works at. I’m thinking this could be a very useful tool for settling some of the burning questions that keep me awake nights, such as:

Here is a game that looks like either a lot of fun or an incredible bore. Somebody try it and tell me how it turns out.

I’m getting better at catching onto internet hipster buzzwords. At this rate, by 2008 I’ll notice one while it’s actually still in use. Going Bedouin appears to be a term of art for freeloading work space at cafes with free wireless, the way I do most of the week, and look, I’m only about nine months late catching on.

In general, I like movies about which I can say, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Mary and I sneaked off and saw the Borat movie the other day and it was like that. My ribs still hurt from the laughing — I think the damage was done during the climactic fight scene in the middle of the movie. (Warning, not that you need it: we were kind of glad we didn’t bring the kids.)
In other movie news, I just found out that there is a Bollywood movie house down in San Jose and another one in Fremont. That’s going to be our next movie outing with the kids. I can’t wait to see their reaction.

Garrison on Salon.com: “Twenty-four people packed into the dining room for my 64th birthday dinner and made a steady dull roar from the salad course right on through the cake and coffee, and I hardly got a word in edgewise. People kept inquiring if I was having fun, which is irritating. The answer is no. I don’t want to be 64. I want to be 43. But that’s life. Life is one disappointment after another. Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we’ve gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota.”

I am 43 now, and I can attest that it’s pretty good.

Disambiguate.

Got to be kidding. First person on my team to use this word gets 10 pushups.

I don’t expect that there will be time for it, but if I can I’m going to try to participate in this little experiment. You try too. Let’s see what happens.

I noticed this just in time for that early X-mas shopping trip we’ve been planning. Get one for each of the crusty, embittered atheists in your life.

Today Laura and Lillian each got a birthday present of their own domain name. The names are pointed to this site for the time being. It won’t work right away, but in the next couple of days if you type in www.laurajue.net or www.lillianjue.net you will come right here to this very page. How neat is that?