Heaven and Hell. They're pretty much the most extreme things, up or down, that you can say about anything. If you want to put something down or put it on a pedestal, you simply need to compare it to hell or heaven, respectively. From our place on earth, heaven and hell are nebulous, unknown concepts, yet we use them as metaphors so often that it seems we have intimate knowledge of them. Well, I have no idea of heaven or hell, but I do know this: the closest you'll get to Purgatory on Earth is an airport terminal.
Terminal C at DFW to be exact, at least in my case. That's where I found myself this morning, when I realized that airport terminals are the loneliest busy, crowded places in the world. In Dante, purgatory is where you go when your destination is known but you have to spend a certain (predestined and handed down from God but variable and seemingly arbitrary to man) amount of time in a hell-like place before you can travel to your permanent home. Sure sounds like a layover to me.
Of course, in Dante, the sinners who are bound for heaven spend their time working off the mortal sins that have been marked on their forehead. In an airport, however, travelers seem to be indulging their characteristic weaknesses. Workahololics, junk-food addicts, and techie loners have all the PDAs, cinnamon rolls, and iPods they need to indulge their greatest vices without the discouraging social norms that characterize the rest of the world.
Airport terminals are the ultimate metaphor for the detatchment we have been able to achieve while remaining entirely connected. On a layover, you can connect with anywhere in the world and can be completely incapable of having a meaningful face-to-face interaction, and you often don't even know what the city you're in is like outside of the walls of the airport.
Whenever my Protestant friends ask me what the idea is behind purgatory, I always struggle to come up with a satisfactory response. Maybe this is as close as I will ever get: There are no BlackBerrys in heaven, so purgatory is where you go to clear out your inbox before entering the pearly gates.
Monday, October 2, 2006
Sunday, October 1, 2006
The Top 10 Funniest Television Comedy Episodes of All Time
1. Missouri Mish Mash (Rocky & Bullwinkle)
2. Pier Pressure (Arrested Development)
3. Homer's Enemy (The Simpsons)
4. The Doll (Curb Your Enthusiasm)
5. The Client (The Office)
6. The Fusilli Jerry (Seinfeld)
7. Aboard the Orient Express (Get Smart)
8. Theo's Holiday (The Cosby Show)
9. Episode Eighteen (Monty Python's Flying Circus)
10. Mother's Last Visit (Diff'rent Strokes)
2. Pier Pressure (Arrested Development)
3. Homer's Enemy (The Simpsons)
4. The Doll (Curb Your Enthusiasm)
5. The Client (The Office)
6. The Fusilli Jerry (Seinfeld)
7. Aboard the Orient Express (Get Smart)
8. Theo's Holiday (The Cosby Show)
9. Episode Eighteen (Monty Python's Flying Circus)
10. Mother's Last Visit (Diff'rent Strokes)
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Spring Training Days 2 and 3
My favorite newcomer so far has to be Junior Spivey. He's always been a solid player, and he's the most conspicuous team member in his calf-high striped socks, always a plus. We'll see if he can live up to Edgar Renteria's old #3. Speaking of uniforms, when I arrived at the stadium in Ft. Lauderdale I was pleasantly surprised to see the Cards wearing their red caps with their grey road uniforms. For the past 15 or so years, they've been wearing navy blue caps with their road uniforms. I think the red caps with the grey jerseys is the best look in baseball--I hope they keep it during the regular season.
The Cardinals lost Monday's game to the Orioles 11-8 in a game that featured 32 hits. The pitching looked pretty suspect, but I guess they get a little bit of a break for pitching to actual major leaguers. Sandwiched between games featuring the no-name Marlins and the Dodgers' soon-to-be AA players, the Orioles ran out Corey Patterson, Melvin Mora, Kevin Millar, Jeff Conine, Jay Gibbons, and Desi Relaford.
Tuesday's game was back at home (Jupiter, FL), and I arrived at the spring training complex just in time to see Chris Carpenter finishing one of his drills and signing some autographs along the chain link fence. But he didn't just sign some autographs; he signed all of them. For 10-15 minutes, Mr. Cy Young 2005 signed balls, signed pictures, and posed for photos until everyone who wanted his time got it, which I had never seen before.
The Cardinals played the Dodgers on Tuesday. The Bums are one of the few National League teams I've never seen play, so I was very excited. The Cards and Dodgers have always been the two most storied NL teams, which is kind of cool. And they've got a bunch of names in their lineup, among them Rafael Furcal, Nomar Garciaparra, Cesar Izturis, Jeff Kent, Bill Mueller, J.D. Drew, and Kenny Lofton. But the lineup I got to see featured Repko, Aybar, Ethier, Guzman, Loney, Martin, Martinez, Abreu, and Andy LaRoche, who between them have two years of major league experience.
Webster's defines "masochism" as "trying to keep score at a spring training game". It took me until the fifth inning of my third spring training game, but I learned that keeping score during spring training is a pretty dumb undertaking. First off, they make all kinds of substitutions without notifying you, and, as was the case today, the players don't have names on their jerseys. Also, there isn't a good scoreboard that shows the lineup, which is important because multiple switches are often made, so you need to know who bats where. Not that it matters. Spring training is where the guy sitting next to you has been a fan for fifty years and the usher has seen more baseball in the month of March than you've seen in your whole life, so you're better off talking baseball than trying to record it.
The Cardinals lost Monday's game to the Orioles 11-8 in a game that featured 32 hits. The pitching looked pretty suspect, but I guess they get a little bit of a break for pitching to actual major leaguers. Sandwiched between games featuring the no-name Marlins and the Dodgers' soon-to-be AA players, the Orioles ran out Corey Patterson, Melvin Mora, Kevin Millar, Jeff Conine, Jay Gibbons, and Desi Relaford.
Tuesday's game was back at home (Jupiter, FL), and I arrived at the spring training complex just in time to see Chris Carpenter finishing one of his drills and signing some autographs along the chain link fence. But he didn't just sign some autographs; he signed all of them. For 10-15 minutes, Mr. Cy Young 2005 signed balls, signed pictures, and posed for photos until everyone who wanted his time got it, which I had never seen before.
The Cardinals played the Dodgers on Tuesday. The Bums are one of the few National League teams I've never seen play, so I was very excited. The Cards and Dodgers have always been the two most storied NL teams, which is kind of cool. And they've got a bunch of names in their lineup, among them Rafael Furcal, Nomar Garciaparra, Cesar Izturis, Jeff Kent, Bill Mueller, J.D. Drew, and Kenny Lofton. But the lineup I got to see featured Repko, Aybar, Ethier, Guzman, Loney, Martin, Martinez, Abreu, and Andy LaRoche, who between them have two years of major league experience.
Webster's defines "masochism" as "trying to keep score at a spring training game". It took me until the fifth inning of my third spring training game, but I learned that keeping score during spring training is a pretty dumb undertaking. First off, they make all kinds of substitutions without notifying you, and, as was the case today, the players don't have names on their jerseys. Also, there isn't a good scoreboard that shows the lineup, which is important because multiple switches are often made, so you need to know who bats where. Not that it matters. Spring training is where the guy sitting next to you has been a fan for fifty years and the usher has seen more baseball in the month of March than you've seen in your whole life, so you're better off talking baseball than trying to record it.
Sunday, March 5, 2006
Spring Training Day 1
There's something uniquely American about going to spring training, and there's also something very American about listening to a Bob Dylan album while driving down the interstate, though I'm not sure how well the two go together. The Dylan record, which I bought this morning, is a symptom of the unfortunate fact that my rental car doesn't have a tape deck to play my iPod, so I had to find something to save me from eastern Florida radio.
Lined with palm trees and orange groves, the drive down Florida's coast down I-95 is really beautiful, with a couple notable exceptions. The last time I was in Florida was for a waste-to-energy project with Dow. I learned that because Florida has a high water table, there are very few places they can put landfills, so the landfills they do have are extremely large. In fact, in some counties the highest elevation is actually a hill filled with garbage. Along my drive today there were only two hills of any size, and wouldn't you know it, both of them were landfills.
I arrived in Jupiter at about 10:30 after leaving Orlando at 8:00. When I made it to the practice fields there were some guys taking batting practice to my right. I was a couple hundred feet from the batter when I heard a ball being hit. When I looked up, it was coming straight for me. I reached up to grab it, and the ball bounded off my fingers and was retrived by a guy behind me. I should have known this already, but I had it reinforced in a pretty painful way: it's tough to catch a well-struck ball barehanded.
At the beginning of last year I got a little tired of hearing how all the Cardinals fans were going to fall in love with David Eckstein. He was described as the kind of guy who brings his lunchpail to the ballpark--he runs to first base on a base on balls, always hustles on every play, and works hard enough to overcome his lack of size. But I've discovered that he's more than just Pete Rose with an adequate haircut. He's a really nice and funny guy, as he continues to demonstrate. Last year at pregame warmups in Houston he enjoyed leaning into the first two rows of fans to catch balls being thrown by his partne, and today he stopped to pose for a few pictures, joking with the woman who was snapping them. Plus, he signs more autographs than just about anybody I've ever seen.
The thing that really cracks me up about spring training is how chummy the players and fans are. After Scott Rolen finished batting practice, an older woman complimented him on his hitting and asked him if he was healthy. He smiled and said, "Healthy enough." Later the same woman had a long conversation about an upcoming cruise that some of the Cardinals participate in.
The game was pretty decent. The Cards beat the Marlins, 6-3, in a pretty sloppy game that featured six errors. By far the most interesting game was had by Travis Hanson. He came in to play third base in the sixth inning and immediately got to work, collecting two quick errors. He had another error in the seventh. Then he hit a homer on the only pitch he saw and had a very nice defensive play in the ninth. For those of you scoring at home, he had a fielding average of .500 (three errors in six chances) and a slugging average of 4.000. Wow.
The Marlins had a fire sale in the offseason. Again. Here's the surnames that made up their starting lineup today: Andino, Uggla, Jacobs (Mike), Willingham, Hermida, Helms, Olivo, Cepicky, Abercrombie, and Mitre. In the entire starting lineup, everybody not named Wes Helms or Miguel Olivo had a grand total of 400 major league at bats (and Helms and Olivo are certainly a far cry from Delgado and Castillo--Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis are the only notable 2005 Marlins still on the roster). I'd say their owner is pulling a Major League and fielding an intentionally bad team so the team can move to Miami, except they're already in Miami. It is fun to see them do the push-ups after popping the ball up, though.
Lined with palm trees and orange groves, the drive down Florida's coast down I-95 is really beautiful, with a couple notable exceptions. The last time I was in Florida was for a waste-to-energy project with Dow. I learned that because Florida has a high water table, there are very few places they can put landfills, so the landfills they do have are extremely large. In fact, in some counties the highest elevation is actually a hill filled with garbage. Along my drive today there were only two hills of any size, and wouldn't you know it, both of them were landfills.
I arrived in Jupiter at about 10:30 after leaving Orlando at 8:00. When I made it to the practice fields there were some guys taking batting practice to my right. I was a couple hundred feet from the batter when I heard a ball being hit. When I looked up, it was coming straight for me. I reached up to grab it, and the ball bounded off my fingers and was retrived by a guy behind me. I should have known this already, but I had it reinforced in a pretty painful way: it's tough to catch a well-struck ball barehanded.
At the beginning of last year I got a little tired of hearing how all the Cardinals fans were going to fall in love with David Eckstein. He was described as the kind of guy who brings his lunchpail to the ballpark--he runs to first base on a base on balls, always hustles on every play, and works hard enough to overcome his lack of size. But I've discovered that he's more than just Pete Rose with an adequate haircut. He's a really nice and funny guy, as he continues to demonstrate. Last year at pregame warmups in Houston he enjoyed leaning into the first two rows of fans to catch balls being thrown by his partne, and today he stopped to pose for a few pictures, joking with the woman who was snapping them. Plus, he signs more autographs than just about anybody I've ever seen.
The thing that really cracks me up about spring training is how chummy the players and fans are. After Scott Rolen finished batting practice, an older woman complimented him on his hitting and asked him if he was healthy. He smiled and said, "Healthy enough." Later the same woman had a long conversation about an upcoming cruise that some of the Cardinals participate in.
The game was pretty decent. The Cards beat the Marlins, 6-3, in a pretty sloppy game that featured six errors. By far the most interesting game was had by Travis Hanson. He came in to play third base in the sixth inning and immediately got to work, collecting two quick errors. He had another error in the seventh. Then he hit a homer on the only pitch he saw and had a very nice defensive play in the ninth. For those of you scoring at home, he had a fielding average of .500 (three errors in six chances) and a slugging average of 4.000. Wow.
The Marlins had a fire sale in the offseason. Again. Here's the surnames that made up their starting lineup today: Andino, Uggla, Jacobs (Mike), Willingham, Hermida, Helms, Olivo, Cepicky, Abercrombie, and Mitre. In the entire starting lineup, everybody not named Wes Helms or Miguel Olivo had a grand total of 400 major league at bats (and Helms and Olivo are certainly a far cry from Delgado and Castillo--Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis are the only notable 2005 Marlins still on the roster). I'd say their owner is pulling a Major League and fielding an intentionally bad team so the team can move to Miami, except they're already in Miami. It is fun to see them do the push-ups after popping the ball up, though.
Saturday, March 4, 2006
Where Have You Gone, Number Fifty-Two?
On Wednesday night, the Aggies defeated the University of Texas in what is one of their two or three biggest victories of all time. Unless something funny happens, they should be headed to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1987. I wasn't able to watch the game, but my sister immediately called me to tell me what had happened. I thought about what it must have been like to see Acie Law hit that shot in a packed Reed Arena, and I thought once again about how far the program has come. Then I thought about what this must be like for the man I'll always consider the face of the Texas A&M basketball program.
The Fightin' Texas Aggie basketball team is my second favorite team of all time, but it hasn't always been that way. The first A&M basketball game I attended was during my freshman year there, and before that I didn't know any of the players or coaches. Before the 1996-97 basketball season began, I checked out one of the preseason publications to see how the Aggies might fare in the innaugural season of the Big 12. They were picked toward, if not at, the bottom, the lone bright spot being the potential of a freshman named Jerald Brown.
Jerald Brown came in as Mr. Basketball in the state of Texas, and he had an interesting college career. He had a great freshman year, earning Freshman of the Year honors in the Big 12 and setting an A&M record for three-pointers. Things went kinda wrong his sophomore year--the team went 1-15 in conference play, and Brown was mired in a shooting slump. It was an awful year that resulted in the end of the Tony Barone era, but the image that sticks with me from that year is from the lone conference win against Baylor. When I opened up the school newspaper the next day, the picture was of Jerald celebrating after the final horn by doing the hand gesture that sophomores do as part of Aggie yells. It's the sort of thing you would expect to see out of a zealous Corps sophomore but not out of an impromptu celebration by an athlete. I took it to mean that Jerald had really taken to A&M as a home, even though, given the support he had received, I wouldn't have faulted him for transferring somewhere else.
Brown's final two years were better but not great. Under head coach Melvin Watkins, Brown was no superstar, but he was a solid contributor and a much happier player. During his junior year he tipped in the winning basket to defeat an Oklahoma team that would eventually go to the Sweet 16, and the next year he had a couple of the greatest interior passes I've ever seen in a huge upset victory over #12 Oklahoma State.
When I was researching for this, I found an article from Brown's senior year claiming that "he had scholarship offers from major powers such as Kansas, North Carolina and Duke, but selected A&M because he wanted to be a part of a remarkable turnaround." I wonder what his reaction is to this overdue resurgence of the basketball program. In a sense, he is the ultimate forefather for this team: Brown's senior year was Bernard King's freshman year, King's senior year was Antoine Wright's freshman year, and Wright's final year was Joseph Jones's freshman year. But in another sense, it's hard to say that somebody who started ten years and two coaches ago can have much of a connection to the current team.
Which is unfortunate, because when you have a drought as long as A&M has had between tournament appearances, you're bound to have a lot of people who contributed in some important way to the team's current situation who will likely be forgotten. That's why I think Jerald Brown is the face of the Texas A&M basketball program. The players and the coach who will be credited with this turnaround are being rewarded with huge crowds and glowing press. The crowd that saw A&M take down Texas was about 4 times the average crowd Brown played in front of, and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of the current fans have even heard of him.
I hope that Jerald Brown can see the current team's success as, at least partially, the result of his own hard work, dedication, and loyalty. When I was in school, the football team was contending for conference championships, and there was a lot of talk about guys like Dat Nguyen and Dan Campbell as the embodiment of the Aggie Spirit. Losing teams don't often get the benefit of having fans identify with them, but I always thought that Jerald was every bit the Aggie anyone else was. He had to be. Between being in the Tony Barone doghouse and playing in front of empty arenas, he had to have something substantial on the inside sustaining him, the same kind of thing that now allows a more talented group of players to thrive at A&M. I hope all the new guys recognize the foundation that people like him have laid.
The Fightin' Texas Aggie basketball team is my second favorite team of all time, but it hasn't always been that way. The first A&M basketball game I attended was during my freshman year there, and before that I didn't know any of the players or coaches. Before the 1996-97 basketball season began, I checked out one of the preseason publications to see how the Aggies might fare in the innaugural season of the Big 12. They were picked toward, if not at, the bottom, the lone bright spot being the potential of a freshman named Jerald Brown.
Jerald Brown came in as Mr. Basketball in the state of Texas, and he had an interesting college career. He had a great freshman year, earning Freshman of the Year honors in the Big 12 and setting an A&M record for three-pointers. Things went kinda wrong his sophomore year--the team went 1-15 in conference play, and Brown was mired in a shooting slump. It was an awful year that resulted in the end of the Tony Barone era, but the image that sticks with me from that year is from the lone conference win against Baylor. When I opened up the school newspaper the next day, the picture was of Jerald celebrating after the final horn by doing the hand gesture that sophomores do as part of Aggie yells. It's the sort of thing you would expect to see out of a zealous Corps sophomore but not out of an impromptu celebration by an athlete. I took it to mean that Jerald had really taken to A&M as a home, even though, given the support he had received, I wouldn't have faulted him for transferring somewhere else.
Brown's final two years were better but not great. Under head coach Melvin Watkins, Brown was no superstar, but he was a solid contributor and a much happier player. During his junior year he tipped in the winning basket to defeat an Oklahoma team that would eventually go to the Sweet 16, and the next year he had a couple of the greatest interior passes I've ever seen in a huge upset victory over #12 Oklahoma State.
When I was researching for this, I found an article from Brown's senior year claiming that "he had scholarship offers from major powers such as Kansas, North Carolina and Duke, but selected A&M because he wanted to be a part of a remarkable turnaround." I wonder what his reaction is to this overdue resurgence of the basketball program. In a sense, he is the ultimate forefather for this team: Brown's senior year was Bernard King's freshman year, King's senior year was Antoine Wright's freshman year, and Wright's final year was Joseph Jones's freshman year. But in another sense, it's hard to say that somebody who started ten years and two coaches ago can have much of a connection to the current team.
Which is unfortunate, because when you have a drought as long as A&M has had between tournament appearances, you're bound to have a lot of people who contributed in some important way to the team's current situation who will likely be forgotten. That's why I think Jerald Brown is the face of the Texas A&M basketball program. The players and the coach who will be credited with this turnaround are being rewarded with huge crowds and glowing press. The crowd that saw A&M take down Texas was about 4 times the average crowd Brown played in front of, and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of the current fans have even heard of him.
I hope that Jerald Brown can see the current team's success as, at least partially, the result of his own hard work, dedication, and loyalty. When I was in school, the football team was contending for conference championships, and there was a lot of talk about guys like Dat Nguyen and Dan Campbell as the embodiment of the Aggie Spirit. Losing teams don't often get the benefit of having fans identify with them, but I always thought that Jerald was every bit the Aggie anyone else was. He had to be. Between being in the Tony Barone doghouse and playing in front of empty arenas, he had to have something substantial on the inside sustaining him, the same kind of thing that now allows a more talented group of players to thrive at A&M. I hope all the new guys recognize the foundation that people like him have laid.
Saturday, February 4, 2006
Coming of Age
I entered Texas A&M in the fall of 1996 as a big basketball fan. I left in the spring of 2000 and, miraculously, I was still a big basketball fan.
I came to A&M from a pretty good basketball town in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The hometown Razorbacks played in a big, modern arena that was always filled with screaming fans. I arrived in Texas to find a culture that either ignored basketball completely or tried to squish it into a football-shaped hole. Advertisements for a game my freshman year said, "We want to have the 12th Man in basketball, too!" And that thing that every college football crowd does at kickoff, with their voices rising to a crescendo that culminates in the kick, we used to do that in basketball, with the tipoff, and what's worse, we even did it to "kick off" the second half, when all that happens is an in-bounds pass. But by far the worst was the band. Now, the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band is stodgy even by college football standards, but a marching military band works well in a football environment. What doesn't work is plopping the Aggie band in the middle of a basketball arena, where the sounds of a giant bass drum clash with the pace of a basketball game.
Oh yeah, the arena. G. Rollie White Coliseum, in its day, was a pretty decent place to watch a ballgame. But by 1996, it was pretty run down, and the thing I noticed about it was that on the court you could see the lane lines for the side basketball goals, a callback to YMCA gyms but not anything befitting a basketball arena.
Nobody deserves to have to watch a basketball game in G. Rollie White with a military band and a team whose standout is a Spanish import named Dario Quesada, but the Aggie basketball fans came close. At every game were a hundred or so interested fans, but at most games the rest of the crowd just sat on their hands, occasionally hissing a call that may or may not have been incorrect. In what may be a first, then-coach Tony Barone threw the A&M fans under the bus after a home loss to Kansas (that occurred before students had returned from winter break), wondering aloud to a television reporter how his team can win when there's nobody there to support him. He was 100% correct, but he was understandably let go not too long after. Whenever I told people I was going to a basketball game, the most common response was "Why?"
Fast forward to today. The Aggies lost in Austin, 83-70. What's most impressive is the way in which they lost and the following they now enjoy. Early in the second half, the Ags were down by 18 points to a team that's probably one of the top five in the nation. They fought back to pull within 6, making a real game of it until Brad "Sweep the Leg Johnny" Buckman drew a questionable charge that represented Joseph Jones's fifth foul. Since Billy Gillispie has taken over, this team has shown a remarkable amount of heart, and it seems to be increasing with every game. But what has really amazed me is the change in the fans. At today's game I sat by a section of A&M students who were more spirited than any entire crowd I was a part of during my time as a student. They did yells, they stayed behind the team, and, especially in the second half, they got really loud. They had such a presence at the game that at times I thought I was in a neutral arena.
I hope that the recent gains the basketball program has made are a sign of things to come. After the first NIT appearance in a decade, the Aggies have responded well to the departure of Antoine Wright and, though they're currently 3-6 in conference, could still make a legitimate run at the tournament given the schedule they have remaining. Whatever happens, I hope they hang onto an environment that is not nearly as inhospitable toward basketball as it was just a few years ago. In fact, Reed Arena is now a really good place to watch a ballgame.
I came to A&M from a pretty good basketball town in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The hometown Razorbacks played in a big, modern arena that was always filled with screaming fans. I arrived in Texas to find a culture that either ignored basketball completely or tried to squish it into a football-shaped hole. Advertisements for a game my freshman year said, "We want to have the 12th Man in basketball, too!" And that thing that every college football crowd does at kickoff, with their voices rising to a crescendo that culminates in the kick, we used to do that in basketball, with the tipoff, and what's worse, we even did it to "kick off" the second half, when all that happens is an in-bounds pass. But by far the worst was the band. Now, the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band is stodgy even by college football standards, but a marching military band works well in a football environment. What doesn't work is plopping the Aggie band in the middle of a basketball arena, where the sounds of a giant bass drum clash with the pace of a basketball game.
Oh yeah, the arena. G. Rollie White Coliseum, in its day, was a pretty decent place to watch a ballgame. But by 1996, it was pretty run down, and the thing I noticed about it was that on the court you could see the lane lines for the side basketball goals, a callback to YMCA gyms but not anything befitting a basketball arena.
Nobody deserves to have to watch a basketball game in G. Rollie White with a military band and a team whose standout is a Spanish import named Dario Quesada, but the Aggie basketball fans came close. At every game were a hundred or so interested fans, but at most games the rest of the crowd just sat on their hands, occasionally hissing a call that may or may not have been incorrect. In what may be a first, then-coach Tony Barone threw the A&M fans under the bus after a home loss to Kansas (that occurred before students had returned from winter break), wondering aloud to a television reporter how his team can win when there's nobody there to support him. He was 100% correct, but he was understandably let go not too long after. Whenever I told people I was going to a basketball game, the most common response was "Why?"
Fast forward to today. The Aggies lost in Austin, 83-70. What's most impressive is the way in which they lost and the following they now enjoy. Early in the second half, the Ags were down by 18 points to a team that's probably one of the top five in the nation. They fought back to pull within 6, making a real game of it until Brad "Sweep the Leg Johnny" Buckman drew a questionable charge that represented Joseph Jones's fifth foul. Since Billy Gillispie has taken over, this team has shown a remarkable amount of heart, and it seems to be increasing with every game. But what has really amazed me is the change in the fans. At today's game I sat by a section of A&M students who were more spirited than any entire crowd I was a part of during my time as a student. They did yells, they stayed behind the team, and, especially in the second half, they got really loud. They had such a presence at the game that at times I thought I was in a neutral arena.
I hope that the recent gains the basketball program has made are a sign of things to come. After the first NIT appearance in a decade, the Aggies have responded well to the departure of Antoine Wright and, though they're currently 3-6 in conference, could still make a legitimate run at the tournament given the schedule they have remaining. Whatever happens, I hope they hang onto an environment that is not nearly as inhospitable toward basketball as it was just a few years ago. In fact, Reed Arena is now a really good place to watch a ballgame.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
The Top 22 Songs from 1 to 21 of All Time
1. One Tin Soldier (Coven)
2. Two of Us (The Beatles)
3. Three Hopeful Thoughts (Rilo Kiley)
4. Four of Two (They Might Be Giants)
5. Five O'Clock World (The Vogues)
6. Six O'Clock News (Kathleen Edwards)
7. Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes)
8. Eight Miles High (The Byrds)
9. (tie) 96 Tears (? and the Mysterians)
9. (tie) 98.6 (Keith)
10. Ten Days (Missy Higgins)
11. 11 Easy Steps (Troutfishing in America)
12. 12 Bellevue (Kathleen Edwards)
13. 13 Steps Lead Down (Elvis Costello)
14. 14th Street (Laura Cantrell)
15. Fifteen Again (The Luxury Liners)
16. 16 Military Wives (The Decemberists)
17. Seventeen Dirty Magazines (Modern Skirts)
18. Eighteen (Alice Cooper)
19. 1921 (The Who)
20. 20 Questions (Amy Rigby)
21. 21st Century Man (Electric Light Orchestra)
2. Two of Us (The Beatles)
3. Three Hopeful Thoughts (Rilo Kiley)
4. Four of Two (They Might Be Giants)
5. Five O'Clock World (The Vogues)
6. Six O'Clock News (Kathleen Edwards)
7. Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes)
8. Eight Miles High (The Byrds)
9. (tie) 96 Tears (? and the Mysterians)
9. (tie) 98.6 (Keith)
10. Ten Days (Missy Higgins)
11. 11 Easy Steps (Troutfishing in America)
12. 12 Bellevue (Kathleen Edwards)
13. 13 Steps Lead Down (Elvis Costello)
14. 14th Street (Laura Cantrell)
15. Fifteen Again (The Luxury Liners)
16. 16 Military Wives (The Decemberists)
17. Seventeen Dirty Magazines (Modern Skirts)
18. Eighteen (Alice Cooper)
19. 1921 (The Who)
20. 20 Questions (Amy Rigby)
21. 21st Century Man (Electric Light Orchestra)
Sunday, January 8, 2006
An Evolution of Communication and Information Systems in the Astrodome
I have no idea why, but I've occasionally wondered what would happen if we had to start over. Like, if we somehow lost all the technology we have developed over thousands of years, leaving only the knowledge we have gained, how long would it take us to get back to where we are today, and how would we do it? If we were armed with nothing but minerals, animals, and vegetables but knew about the possibility of things like the automobile and the internet, how would we create them? With foreknowledge of things like pollution, how might we do things differently?
When I asked myself these questions, I was mainly thinking about many of the inefficiencies that pop up as we try to move ahead as a civilization. I once read that the fax machine will be viewed by history as a pretty much unnecessary invention whose only purpose was to move us from snail mail to email. When you think about it, it makes sense: if we had it to do all over again, we would probably just go straight to email, bypassing the fax machine altogether. Our history is probably full of places where we took a serpentine route toward a more "ideal" technology, but the question of how we could have done things differently is largely academic. Or is it?
When Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people, families were torn completely apart and, in many cases, sent to shelters at opposite ends of the country. Without warning, the communities housing those who were evacuated were forced to create some way to document these individuals and get them in touch with their loved ones. Since these evacuees arrived with little or no documentation and carried cell phones that no longer worked, the struggle of these shelters to reinsert these people back into society reads like a condensed history of communication. In many cases, we have served these displaced Americans well by adapting our high-tech capabilities to their low-tech circumstances. But in other cases, we have acted as though we haven't been there before.
When I arrived at the Reliant complex (which includes the Astrodome, the Reliant Center, and Reliant Arena) on Monday, September 5, at 6:00 a.m., about 25,000 former residents of the New Orleans area had been living there for between two and four days. I arrived with my laptop because I had learned that people with wireless-enabled laptops were needed, and I was assigned to something called Operation Get In Touch, which I learned was a website set up by Pinnacle Wireless specifically for Katrina victims.
When I entered the Reliant Center, I sat down at a long row of tables, plugged in, and was immediately struck by the wall in front of me. A big banner high on the wall said, "Sign In Here," and below that, stretched across about 100 feet, were the letters A to Z. Below that were thousands of index cards and hundreds of sheets of paper and posterboards. On each card, or paper, or poster, was basic information about an evacuee (often no more than first and last name) and the names of people he was looking for. The cards served two functions: they were the first forms of official registration for residents (though it's unclear how many residents actually signed in), and they allowed residents to see who else had arrived, giving them an opportunity to find lost loved ones.
To anyone who's been alive in the past fifty years, the idea of cards taped to a wall as a means of tracking 25,000 people may seem inadequate, and it is. But keep in mind that when these people arrived documentation was close to the last thing on anyone's mind, never mind the fact that the computer power to enter these people in some kind of database was not available (I was told that as late as Sunday the Reliant Center still had only one computer for getting people registered).
I was quickly informed that I would be entering registration information for residents of the Reliant Center into an online database as well as using existing online tools to help residents find lost friends and family. The written information we were to enter had, I think, been taken down by volunteers who had talked to evacuees. It was asked whether we would be entering the information contained in the cards on the wall. At that time, nobody in our area knew.
Entering evacuees' information into the database was simple enough, but it was clear that the information we were getting from people was not always sufficient. Information that would allow us to distinguish duplicate names, things like middle names and birth dates, were not always supplied. Still, having the information in a searchable database was a huge step up from keeping information on paper only.
For people who came to us wanting to look for lost relatives, we were given two main websites to search through: the one we had been entering information into (Get In Touch), and the Red Cross self registry that they had been encouraging people to use in shelters spread across the country. I added a couple sites I already knew about, put together by CNN and MSNBC to my go-to list of databases. In the beginning of this process of connecting people, I'd have to describe the system that evolved as a marketplace, in the sense that each website had its own market or demographic that it appealed to and, in the absence of a clear standard, the strengths and weaknesses of each website helped determine how well it was going to compete. For instance, the Get In Touch website initially had the best search capability of any website. The problem was that it was just getting off the ground in terms of number of entries, and the entries it had were sometimes incomplete. The Red Cross website had a ton of information right off the bat, but the way it searched its entries could be confusing. When a woman approached me and asked me to look for her son (who had a common first name but a unique last name) I simply typed in the last name, which turned up no matches. Then, out of curiosity, I tried entering both the first name and the last name, and I got a match. The Red Cross website simply has a list of entries, and conducting a search takes you to a place on the list based on the first letters you entered. So searching for "John Smith" will take you to the middle of the J's and "Smith John" will take you to the middle of the S's. Websites for news organizations, as well as the Family Messages site, included many people who had left on their own in addition to those who were evacuated, but initially these sites were very limited, probably to people who had independent access to television or the internet.
Lack of a standard is something networks deal with all the time. Think of Monday morning's family connection network as kind of like VHS and Beta back in the 1980s. Just like Betamax owners ran the risk of missing out on entertainment options through their choice of an unpopular platform, searchers who looked through an unpopular database also risked missing out. Except instead of being unable to view a VHS copy of Wargames, they were ignorant of the fact that a loved one they were searching for was sitting on a different website.
Enter Yahoo. Seeing the need for a single destination for searchers, Yahoo created a site that indexed every existing Katrina search out there. I learned about it early Monday afternoon, and it was a godsend. Now I would no longer search twelve sites and worry that the thirteenth site might have held useful information. Well, sort of. Initially, the Yahoo site didn't index a lot of the information on the Red Cross and Get In Touch websites, so I used the three together.
Eventually, Yahoo was able to index every major database successfully, and as our search capability became more refined we concentrated on including more people in the database. We dismantled the wall of index cards and started entering all the information into our computers. After Labor Day, though, the volunteers who showed up with laptops were few and far between, and data entry progressed slowly.
Throughout the week, more shelters came online, and connecting families switched from a nearly hopeless endeavor to a fairly reliable process. As it did, my job evolved from finding people to helping people get back on their feet: searching for job resources, lending out my cell phone, and helping people navigate the maze of services at the Reliant complex.
And it was a maze of services. Between the post office, insurance services, job assistance, travel assistance, FEMA assistance, and many others, residents easily got confused preparing to leave the complex. There was an order of operations that had to be followed, which, because it was neither obvious nor well communicated, had people stopping by the same place three and four times. Also, because they had been put up in a haphazard fashion, many of these services would switch places every couple days, which meant that maps often had people going to the wrong place. Oh yeah, and there were redundant services in the three buildings that were often unaware of each other. On Friday I made my first trip to the Astrodome to put up some advertisements for Operation Get in Touch. At one point I ran into the people from Continental Airlines, who were giving people free airfare and were happy to know where my group was located because they had received many questions. On the other end of the stadium, along the dark concourse, were a group of people at computers who were helping evacuees search for lost relatives and were quite upset that I was advertising the same service in another building.
The communication between buildings was never great, but it did the job. Except for the PA system, which was unique to each building and had about a 1% success rate of paging people, everyone found what they were looking for sooner or later. By the following Monday (September 12), the residents of the shelters were able to access one of about fifty desktop computers that had been set up for them. The volunteers at the laptops still conducted searches and entered information, but once residents could independently look for relatives and send email, communication became much easier. As the Yahoo page was working well for everyone who came to see us, we turned our attention to the people who could not make it over to us. The Reliant Center housed many elderly evacuees who had neither entered their names into the database nor searched for others. We brought our laptops to their cots and sat and searched with them, so that by the middle of my second week at the shelters everyone theoretically had access to the evacuee information on the internet.
As we improved our ability to keep track of people, there were fewer people there to keep track of. Starting at about 25,000 on September 4, the population of the Reliant Complex dwindled to 4500 on September 11, then less than 1500 on September 18. By September 20, plans were in place to move the remaining 1000 evacuees to Fort Smith, Arkansas, in preparation for Hurricane Rita. The facility they left behind displayed signs of the progress the Reliant complex had undergone. On my last day at the facility (which was actually a couple days before the last evacuees had left), there were computers doing pretty much all of the work, while posters still covered the vast hallways and seating sections of the Astrodome. The process that connected index cards to computers was a disjointed one, and it’s unfortunate that some residents were required to reregister a few times before they would be located. But the result was actually a very interesting lesson about the dynamics of an impromptu organization.
When I asked myself these questions, I was mainly thinking about many of the inefficiencies that pop up as we try to move ahead as a civilization. I once read that the fax machine will be viewed by history as a pretty much unnecessary invention whose only purpose was to move us from snail mail to email. When you think about it, it makes sense: if we had it to do all over again, we would probably just go straight to email, bypassing the fax machine altogether. Our history is probably full of places where we took a serpentine route toward a more "ideal" technology, but the question of how we could have done things differently is largely academic. Or is it?
When Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people, families were torn completely apart and, in many cases, sent to shelters at opposite ends of the country. Without warning, the communities housing those who were evacuated were forced to create some way to document these individuals and get them in touch with their loved ones. Since these evacuees arrived with little or no documentation and carried cell phones that no longer worked, the struggle of these shelters to reinsert these people back into society reads like a condensed history of communication. In many cases, we have served these displaced Americans well by adapting our high-tech capabilities to their low-tech circumstances. But in other cases, we have acted as though we haven't been there before.
When I arrived at the Reliant complex (which includes the Astrodome, the Reliant Center, and Reliant Arena) on Monday, September 5, at 6:00 a.m., about 25,000 former residents of the New Orleans area had been living there for between two and four days. I arrived with my laptop because I had learned that people with wireless-enabled laptops were needed, and I was assigned to something called Operation Get In Touch, which I learned was a website set up by Pinnacle Wireless specifically for Katrina victims.
When I entered the Reliant Center, I sat down at a long row of tables, plugged in, and was immediately struck by the wall in front of me. A big banner high on the wall said, "Sign In Here," and below that, stretched across about 100 feet, were the letters A to Z. Below that were thousands of index cards and hundreds of sheets of paper and posterboards. On each card, or paper, or poster, was basic information about an evacuee (often no more than first and last name) and the names of people he was looking for. The cards served two functions: they were the first forms of official registration for residents (though it's unclear how many residents actually signed in), and they allowed residents to see who else had arrived, giving them an opportunity to find lost loved ones.
To anyone who's been alive in the past fifty years, the idea of cards taped to a wall as a means of tracking 25,000 people may seem inadequate, and it is. But keep in mind that when these people arrived documentation was close to the last thing on anyone's mind, never mind the fact that the computer power to enter these people in some kind of database was not available (I was told that as late as Sunday the Reliant Center still had only one computer for getting people registered).
I was quickly informed that I would be entering registration information for residents of the Reliant Center into an online database as well as using existing online tools to help residents find lost friends and family. The written information we were to enter had, I think, been taken down by volunteers who had talked to evacuees. It was asked whether we would be entering the information contained in the cards on the wall. At that time, nobody in our area knew.
Entering evacuees' information into the database was simple enough, but it was clear that the information we were getting from people was not always sufficient. Information that would allow us to distinguish duplicate names, things like middle names and birth dates, were not always supplied. Still, having the information in a searchable database was a huge step up from keeping information on paper only.
For people who came to us wanting to look for lost relatives, we were given two main websites to search through: the one we had been entering information into (Get In Touch), and the Red Cross self registry that they had been encouraging people to use in shelters spread across the country. I added a couple sites I already knew about, put together by CNN and MSNBC to my go-to list of databases. In the beginning of this process of connecting people, I'd have to describe the system that evolved as a marketplace, in the sense that each website had its own market or demographic that it appealed to and, in the absence of a clear standard, the strengths and weaknesses of each website helped determine how well it was going to compete. For instance, the Get In Touch website initially had the best search capability of any website. The problem was that it was just getting off the ground in terms of number of entries, and the entries it had were sometimes incomplete. The Red Cross website had a ton of information right off the bat, but the way it searched its entries could be confusing. When a woman approached me and asked me to look for her son (who had a common first name but a unique last name) I simply typed in the last name, which turned up no matches. Then, out of curiosity, I tried entering both the first name and the last name, and I got a match. The Red Cross website simply has a list of entries, and conducting a search takes you to a place on the list based on the first letters you entered. So searching for "John Smith" will take you to the middle of the J's and "Smith John" will take you to the middle of the S's. Websites for news organizations, as well as the Family Messages site, included many people who had left on their own in addition to those who were evacuated, but initially these sites were very limited, probably to people who had independent access to television or the internet.
Lack of a standard is something networks deal with all the time. Think of Monday morning's family connection network as kind of like VHS and Beta back in the 1980s. Just like Betamax owners ran the risk of missing out on entertainment options through their choice of an unpopular platform, searchers who looked through an unpopular database also risked missing out. Except instead of being unable to view a VHS copy of Wargames, they were ignorant of the fact that a loved one they were searching for was sitting on a different website.
Enter Yahoo. Seeing the need for a single destination for searchers, Yahoo created a site that indexed every existing Katrina search out there. I learned about it early Monday afternoon, and it was a godsend. Now I would no longer search twelve sites and worry that the thirteenth site might have held useful information. Well, sort of. Initially, the Yahoo site didn't index a lot of the information on the Red Cross and Get In Touch websites, so I used the three together.
Eventually, Yahoo was able to index every major database successfully, and as our search capability became more refined we concentrated on including more people in the database. We dismantled the wall of index cards and started entering all the information into our computers. After Labor Day, though, the volunteers who showed up with laptops were few and far between, and data entry progressed slowly.
Throughout the week, more shelters came online, and connecting families switched from a nearly hopeless endeavor to a fairly reliable process. As it did, my job evolved from finding people to helping people get back on their feet: searching for job resources, lending out my cell phone, and helping people navigate the maze of services at the Reliant complex.
And it was a maze of services. Between the post office, insurance services, job assistance, travel assistance, FEMA assistance, and many others, residents easily got confused preparing to leave the complex. There was an order of operations that had to be followed, which, because it was neither obvious nor well communicated, had people stopping by the same place three and four times. Also, because they had been put up in a haphazard fashion, many of these services would switch places every couple days, which meant that maps often had people going to the wrong place. Oh yeah, and there were redundant services in the three buildings that were often unaware of each other. On Friday I made my first trip to the Astrodome to put up some advertisements for Operation Get in Touch. At one point I ran into the people from Continental Airlines, who were giving people free airfare and were happy to know where my group was located because they had received many questions. On the other end of the stadium, along the dark concourse, were a group of people at computers who were helping evacuees search for lost relatives and were quite upset that I was advertising the same service in another building.
The communication between buildings was never great, but it did the job. Except for the PA system, which was unique to each building and had about a 1% success rate of paging people, everyone found what they were looking for sooner or later. By the following Monday (September 12), the residents of the shelters were able to access one of about fifty desktop computers that had been set up for them. The volunteers at the laptops still conducted searches and entered information, but once residents could independently look for relatives and send email, communication became much easier. As the Yahoo page was working well for everyone who came to see us, we turned our attention to the people who could not make it over to us. The Reliant Center housed many elderly evacuees who had neither entered their names into the database nor searched for others. We brought our laptops to their cots and sat and searched with them, so that by the middle of my second week at the shelters everyone theoretically had access to the evacuee information on the internet.
As we improved our ability to keep track of people, there were fewer people there to keep track of. Starting at about 25,000 on September 4, the population of the Reliant Complex dwindled to 4500 on September 11, then less than 1500 on September 18. By September 20, plans were in place to move the remaining 1000 evacuees to Fort Smith, Arkansas, in preparation for Hurricane Rita. The facility they left behind displayed signs of the progress the Reliant complex had undergone. On my last day at the facility (which was actually a couple days before the last evacuees had left), there were computers doing pretty much all of the work, while posters still covered the vast hallways and seating sections of the Astrodome. The process that connected index cards to computers was a disjointed one, and it’s unfortunate that some residents were required to reregister a few times before they would be located. But the result was actually a very interesting lesson about the dynamics of an impromptu organization.
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