What Can You Do With Three Feet of Snow?

Argue climate change, keep shovel ready

As landlords go, ours is a good one. She did raise our rent last year, which raised my level of ungenerous thoughts about her. But she called the other day to ask how we were making out during the series of snowstorms that have blasted D.C. and the rest of the mid-Atlantic. I told her we were fine and our conversation moved on to the statistical odds against having two Top Ten snowstorms hit the area in the same year (a subsequent 10" snow hit the area yesterday--not Top Ten, but big enough to be the largest storm in most Washington winters).

Good weather records for the area (at least regarding depth of snow deposited by storms) go back 100 years or so. So the likelihood of having a Top Ten storm happen in any given year is about 1 in 10. The likelihood of two Top Ten storms in any given year is 1 in 100. Add in a third 10" storm and consider that area weather data goes back more than 100 years, the likelihood of all three storms happening in the same year is probably somewhere around once every 150 to 200 years. Long odds, I think, but nowhere near rare enough to prove anything, least of all climate change, which will abound in very difficult to predict consequences (for the Daily Show's perspective on the difference between weather and climate, go here).

Still, whether or not the recent snows reinforce arguments for or against climate change, they are most certainly weather, which is, once again,something everyone likes to talk about. The thing about heavy snowfall is you don't just get to talk about it, you actually have to shovel it. And, let me note here that I'm going through my 62nd winter on this planet and spent 59 of those winters in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Boulder and Dayton, residing here in D.C., south of the Mason-Dixon line for the last three.

But it is only here in Washington that I have had to shovel snow every day for a week; that's what people do in North Dakota and Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and, I guess, in Buffalo. So, though isolated weather events do not prove climate change , rigorous scientific models that support the argument for global warming also predict increases in severe weather events (see a discussion of climate change and severe weather here). Personally, after moving around an estimated ton of snow in the past week, I'm going to invest in a back up snow shovel; my unsolicited advice to those living in the Deep South, the current bastion of Republicanism and center of the fundamentalist argument with science: Keep a snow shovel handy. The one you use for manure just won't do.

Confession

Once, when Nate and I were discussing the way I parented him, he said that he always thought of me as too self-centered to be a really good father. He seemed to think that often when I was around the house, around him, I wasn't really present. Except, maybe to get angry with him when he distracted me from the things I was focussed on.

I defended myself. I don't remember exactly what I said. Something about how much I thought about him all the time. I tried to make it sound like the way I thought about him was on an emotional level equal in some way to the power of my perceived absence. I don't think he bought it, but he had the mature grace to let me pretend that he was persuaded.

But--and this is why I'm actually blogging on the day after Christmas--Nate was right. I was quite self-centered (still am, I guess) and I wanted to get it written down here so that I couldn't take it back.

Still, let me try to extract something of value from this. Three things, really. I'm proud of Nate, of the adult he has become. I hope Nate knows that he is right in his understanding of how much more I could have done for him and with him. And, I hope all of us understand that every day is a chance to do better.

Beet Stalks In the Disposal

Bad Idea

Here's what happens when you put beet stalks in the garbage disposal: The blades of the disposal, which are actually grinders rather than cutters, strip the vegetable layers binding the fibers of the stalks. The grinders turn the vegetable matter to a swampy mush and relentlessly fold and refold the fibers and stuff the indigestible mess into the small holes that drain the grinding surface of the disposal, plugging it.

If you leave the disposal going and the water running, the sink will begin to fill. But before the water reaches a depth of, say, two inches, the disposal will fling water, vegetable matter and fiber back out of the sink drain and, sometimes, achieve something like lift off. A revenge, of sorts, for victims of food chain tyranny.

The process of clearing the disposal, which comes next, is interesting, but an account of that process would distract us from the value of the experience, what the experience teaches us: Don't put beet stalks in the disposal.


Next Week: What happens when you allow the gas bar-b-q to fill with too much propane before pushing the igniter button.

Marrianne Must Be Some Sort of Saint

What I Learned On Brendan's Way to School

This morning, pretty much at the last possible moment before heading off to school, something urgent suddenly appeared at the top of Brendan’s to-do list. He’s involved in a project at school with a few classmates; they are scripting and staging a television show of their own. Brendan decided that he didn’t fully trust that others would pull together the necessary elements of the backing soundtrack for their production.

As Marrianne was pulling on her coat and gathering her stuff, nearly ready to walk out the door, Brendan charged back up the stairs to fetch some of the items for his backup plan. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, not comprehending his plan, at all, and shouted after him.

“Get down here, Brendan. Get your coat on. Mom’s ready to leave,” adding, with a touch of anxiety, “What are you doing?”

In an impressive, but not untypical show of indifference to my mounting anxiety, he came down with a pair of mini-speakers he uses with his computer. “These need batteries,” he said, thrusting the speakers at me.

Despite my sense that we ought to be doing something else, I reacted in my own programmed fashion to the phrase “need
batteries". I ran up the stairs to get batteries (rechargeable, of course).

Meanwhile, Brendan proceeded on to the next step in his overambitious plan: burning, in 60 seconds or less, a few of the songs he’d already selected onto a CD he would take to school. I got the batteries and installed them, then rushed downstairs to try and get him back on track. But his computer had already sent him a no-go message about the CD he was trying to burn and he was off to test the disc in a different tech apparatus.

With a touch of desperation, he reported that he couldn’t complete the intended burn. In an attempt to both get him back on the priority task, leaving the house, and solve his problem, I said something rushed that hopefully sounded a little bit like “just-use-a-CD-you’ve-already-got and put-your-coat-on.”

“There isn’t one that will work,” he said, nearly giving up. Then he brightened. “Oh, yeah, the Timbaland CD will work.” And he was off again, running upstairs while I tried out a few deep breaths before I got to screaming at him.

Moments later, Marrianne and Brendan were out the door, coats on, speakers and CD packed, ready for the commute to work and school. I, meanwhile, needed regrouping. This, it turns out, I did quite effectively by washing a load of laundry in the bathtub.

Though it is a digression, I should note that I am eminently qualified to write about doing laundry, though my mother sees the fact that I do it by hand as a symptom of my insanity. “Please don’t tell anyone you do laundry in the bathtub,” she regularly implores. This is not because she is particularly affected by the thought that I am crazy. She just doesn’t want anyone else to know.

But doing laundry by hand gives one ample time to reflect. While I did the load this morning, I thought about Brendan’s last minute project and the wreckage he left behind.

A few blank CDs rejected by the computer were scattered around the desk on the first floor. The original contents of his backpack, unloaded to make room for the speakers, lay in a pile on the dining room floor. His CD index, Timbaland temporarily removed, was on the living room floor, snuggled up against a tripod and camera he’d gotten out for a previous project.

It all, I reflected, reminded me of myself when I get an uncontrollable urge to undertake a last minute project on virtually anything, which I should admit, is my favorite way to begin a project; riding on a surge of adrenaline, starting with a planning stage of, oh, say, 30 seconds, racing around the house pulling books from shelves and papers from files, and maybe, maybe, finishing the project before the next urge strikes (disables?) me.

As I type, I am sitting at our dining room table, a third of which, to Marrianne’s endless dismay, is littered with books and papers and newspaper clippings and receipts from project already underway. It makes me think, seeing myself surface that way in Brendan, that Marrianne, having lived with me and mostly loved me these last 20 or so years, must be some sort of Irish saint.

Going Postal

Going Postal

I bought stamps the other day. Walked up to the bulletproof barrier and said, “I want 100 first class stamps, please.”

The postal worker held up strips of Liberty Bell stamps.

“No liberty bells, please,” I said and she asked if I wanted American Flag stamps.

“No flags please,” I said. “And no liberty bells.”

Her eyelids drooped and she nodded toward a sheet of Disney stamps lying on the counter.

“Disney?” I might have sounded a little irritated. “Don’t you have any people stamps?”

She shook her head and then, apparently reconsidering, she asked if I wanted Charles Chesnutt stamps. Widely regarded as the first true African-American novelist, Chesnutt would look good on my mail, I thought. I was enthusiastic.

“A person? You bet!”

My postal worker nodded and walked away. The worker at the counter next to her looked over at me and smiled. While I stood there waiting, another post office employee looked around the corner, almost peeking at me, it seemed. We made eye contact and he nodded. I nodded back, constituting at least the fourth nod between two people in that office on that morning that I was aware of.

Then my postal worker came back with 100 41-cent stamps. I had other stamp denominations I wanted to buy and I wished I’d mentioned them before she walked away the first time. I was afraid she would lose patience with me.

“Oh, yeah. I also wanted 20 post card stamps and 20 next-ounce stamps.”

She looked at me.

“Sorry,” I said and she said it was okay and walked away again. When she came back, I had more stamps, 20 26-cent stamps and 20 17-cent stamps, or 20 cougars and 20 mountain goats (a big-horned, big-headed fellow) to go with my 100 Charles Chesnutts.

I paid my bill and thanked her.

“That was fun,” I said. “I should write more letters.”

“Thank you,” she said with a big smile on her face, but I swear I thought she was going to go postal on me. Maybe leap through that bulletproof shield and grab me and throw all kinds of hugs and sloppy kisses my way.

That would have been okay with me. In fact, I’m planning to write more letters.

Thanks to Arthur C. Clarke for Virtual Joy

In an obituary earlier this month, I read that one of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories, “Dial F for Frankenstein,” inspired a British scientist “to invent the World Wide Web in 1989.” This struck me as an unlikely story.

I have no doubt that a Clarke story may have inspired scientist Tim Berners-Lee (hyphenization courtesy of the obit’s author). I just question whether he, or anyone else, can be said to have “invented” the web.

Over the last couple of years, my son Brendan and I have had several conversations about such things. Brendan, now nine years old, has initiated these discussions with the regular claim that Bill Gates invented the internet.

His nearly habitual assertion would launch what became, in repetition, a conversation both tedious and infuriating. It is with some relief that I can say that it has been some time, six weeks or more, since he last made his emphatic Bill Gates claim.

He stopped, I think, because we found a book at the DC public library that helped to ground our discussion. The book, called Cyberspace and written by David Jefferis, is aimed at kids. Jefferis manages to write about the development of the internet without a single reference to Bill Gates.

The internet, it turns out, “developed because of the ‘cold war,’ a power struggle between communist and non-communist countries that lasted from 1945 to 1989.” Defense planners were looking for a way to maintain communications in the event of nuclear attack. They explored a network of connected sites that did not depend on a single hub.

“This first Internet, named the ARAPnet, was set up in the 1960s.” Apparently, it solved the planners’ problem. “From then on, there was no stopping the growth of the Net,” Jefferis wrote.

(It may seem to readers as though I'm not following a strict system for capitalizing words here. But this is the rule I’m following: If I’m quoting someone who capitalizes “internet” or “web,” the capitalization stands. But if I’m using those words to make a point—entirely my own or paraphrased—I’m not capitalizing. I don’t capitalize the word “god,” either. On this point, my Bill Gates/Microsoft-developed Word program disagrees. Word underlines, in red, every instance of my use of “internet” that I don’t capitalize.)

In any case, I used passages from “Cyberspace” to help make the point to Brendan that the development of the internet was a collective achievement. Gates, after all, hadn’t even been born when the cold war began.

Though he’d never been persuaded by me before, the notion that the “military,” another legendary entity in Brendan’s mind, might have a hand in inventing the internet, relieved him greatly and he was able to set aside his faith in the omnipresence of Bill Gates in the history of Everything. (In this paragraph, for reasons unknown to me, Word has begun underlining in green each use of “internet” that I fail to capitalize.)

So, when I read that Berners-Lee had been moved by Clarke’s story to invent the web, I persuaded Brendan to take another trip to the library with me (the Lamond-Riggs branch of DC public.)

Now, as Brendan settles in with a baseball book—“Rookie of the Year”—I have retrieved “Cyberspace” and am consulting it for a bit of info about Tim Berners-Lee. As it turns out, Clarke’s obit writer has not stretched the fabric of truth quite as far as Brendan did in his story of the internet.

There’s a small photo of this guy, Berners-Lee on page 10 of “Cyberspace.” The caption, which has done away with all hyphens, says Lee, “of Switzerland’s CERN laboratory, is thought of as the brains behind the World Wide Web.”

Of course, that achievement has broader roots than Lee’s brain, also. “Cyberspace” says that in 1945 American scientist Vannever Bush “proposed using a ‘memex,’ a machine that [could store] information. [And] lay a trail of related words and pictures.”

Vannever Bush, says the book, “is often called the father of the information age.” Further, writes Jefferis, “the memex was never built, but in 1960, programmer Ted Nelson was inspired by the idea to write the hypertext computer language. This used hyperlinks to take a user on a trail of linked information sources.”

All of this actually suggests that the web and the internet were “born,” ultimately from the fertile partnership of Metaphor and Hyperbole (caps mine), which themselves originated in once both ritualized and spontaneous social, cultural and collective activities like storytelling or, perhaps, originated in the domestications of grains and the brewing of malt beverages some 10,000 years ago.

Personally, I find that my own use of the internet (and my laptop and other related items) is a mixed benefit to me. Just two days ago—ironically or not, the same day I read the Clarke obituary—I composed several clever e-mails to my landlord and to other correspondents. And, even more cleverly, but mistakenly, copied those messages to two of Brendan’s teachers; people who had no interest whatsoever in the content or style of my e-mails about sewers and lunch.

In the process, I discovered that in the wake of the internet and the web, it is possible for me to sit at home, entirely by myself, and use these developments to embarrass myself publicly.

In a final connotative leap, I’d like to volunteer another tidbit from “Cyberspace.” A picture of a young man, posing near two large, now archaic, computers and staring bravely (visionarily?) off into space is captioned this way:

“Ray Tomlinson devised the electronic mail system in the US in 1972. He used the now-universal ‘at’ symbol to show an e-mail address: this person @ that computer.”

It is therefore thanks to Ray, Arthur, Tim, Vannever and countless other less well-known brains, "fathers of," and inventors—me, you, Al Gore, Emma Goldman, and millions of servants, serfs and slaves throughout history—that I can anticipate yet another time in the future when I might sit home by myself and somehow commit one more public faux pas.

It makes me want to both blush and jump for virtual joy.