23 December 02013 (Happy Christmas Adam!): Hit List Addenda

Having listened to a lot of "all-Christmas, all the time" radio over the past week's Western sojourn, there are three new additions to the list of holiday tunes I don't need ever to hear again.

1. It's Beginning To Look A  Lot Like Christmas.  There are lots of versions out there, but there's not a lot unusual being done with this song, at least not in the versions I was hearing.  While I would object to the modification, on political correctness grounds, of this song by replacing "a pistol that shoots" with some other longed-for gift, at least someone would be taking a stand for something.  (I'm sure someone has recorded such a version.  I'm not interested in enduring hearing it.)

2. I'll Be Home For Christmas.  The only remotely interesting thing in the multiple re-recordings that are out there is seeing how they handle what I call the "preposition problem".  Will the singer stick with "presents on the tree", or will it be "'neath", or "by", or something else a bit more logistically sound?

This represents a pretty desperate reach on my part to find something worth caring about.

3. Home For The Holidays.  Again, nothing particularly new about the versions of this song--if indeed something exists--makes it to radio airplay.

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15 December 02013 (Happy birthday!): OTRA*

It's that time once more.

One thing* that Kim Jong Un has done for humanity is to guarantee that nephices all over the world will have a pretty good December holiday season, regardless of which holiday they celebrate.

I mean, what's a slightly nicer gift now if it means you won't be up against the wall when a niece or nephew is running your country?

I hope that the Gang of Eleven keeps this in mind over their lives.  (Of that group, one jumps out at me as far and away the most dangerous if he/she ever got unlimited power, but I'll keep that name to myself.  For now.)

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*--Possibly the only thing.

12 December 02013: ACME-10: Songs For All Seasons

This year's Christmas music entry takes a slightly wider--in several senses of the word--view of the winter holidays.

1. At Christmas Time, Dan Fogelberg.  In a nod to the original meaning of the season, this one starts off with the line "At Christmas time we raise our hearts* and celebrate the solstice."  Hear that, "War On Christmas" warriors?  Solstice.  This also works in the "Lighten Up, America!" subgenre around here.  No further commentary required.  (Dan F., by the way, got a mention on last night's Late Night With David Letterman in the show's annual holiday music Top Ten list.)

2. Christmas In California, America. I like a bit of geographical diversity in my holiday tunes.   Hence "Christmas In The Caribbean" on the first holiday mix (02010) and #2 and 3 this year.

3. Christmas In Las Vegas, Richard Cheese.  Speaking of geography, this also fulfills my commitment to include comedy in these annual lists.  There's no mention of Christmas lights on cactus, but that's about all that's missing.

4. Christmas Lights, Blush. I've been sitting on this one since I heard it on the radio last year after ACME-9 went up.  Another Sirius find, at least originally for me--which means that it's been scribbled on a  scrap of paper on my desk for months now, as is my nature with ACME's.

5. Whistle 'Neath The Mistletoe, Briana Winter. A second Sirius find, this one was released last year on an "indie" album.  I've been listening, very occasionally, to Pandora's Indie Holiday Music channel, and I find most of it way too dull for my tastes--many artists in that genre seem to have forgotten the notion that Christmas should be, at some level, enjoyable..  This one manages to avoid the worst of the darkness of indie music.

Time to shift gears a bit.  I have decided that, to my ears, the folks who damage most traditional holiday hymns for radio airplay are the singers, and that some hymns which don't work because of the pseudo-operatic bellowing that many folks bring to the table are perfectly fine tunes when performed without vocals.  The challenge there is finding the songs for which the lyrics aren't so well-known (and overblown, in many cases) that they earworm their way into your brain.  "O Holy Night", for example, can't be saved by giving the singers the day off--it's hard to hear the tune without thinking of the lyrics, often being sung badly.  You need the vocals to exist--it's hard to tag a song as a Christmas tune without them**--but if they can be fully and completely jettisoned from the performance and from your mind, what's left is sometimes worthwhile listening.

The cutoff, I have determined, is "Carol of the Bells".  Yes, it's got lyrics, but they're somewhat obscure, often confusing***, and probably not, in the large, familiar enough to be an earworm.  So here's a shift to lesser carols that work better instrumentally.

6. Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring, Alon Goldstein.  The link here is to an organ version, but there are certainly other instrumental arrangements that work.  So long as the choir has the night off.

7. The Holly and the Ivy, George Winston.  There's no reason to prefer one piano arrangement over any other, but I kind of like this one anyway.  George W.'s December album does a good job with the holiday tunes.

8. Some Children See Him, George Winston.  See note on #7.

Back to songs with words now.

9. Jingle Jingle Jingle, Stan Francis (from the Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer soundtrack).  Back to the fun stuff.  This one deserves a higher profile than it has.  Not that this listing will help.

10. Nutrocker, Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  What I find interesting about this piece is that it was first released on a non-holiday album (Night Castle).  For a band that's primarily known for their takes on holiday tunes, this is an impressive stretch.  (The title of TSO's recent EP, Dreams of Fireflies on a Christmas Night, makes one wonder a bit about the geographical authenticity of their name.  I doubt that there are many fireflies traversing Tunguska in late December.  It's geographical diversity in a good sense, I suppose.)

11. You Make It Feel Like Christmas, Neil Diamond.  Also originally released on a non-holiday album (Primitive).  This is a trend that I enjoy for some reason.

We time-travel backwards for the music and forward on the calendar for the last two songs on this year's holiday mix.

12. The Man With The Bag, Kay Starr.  This version is pretty definitive, even if it may not be the original.  Remakers should leave it alone.

13. What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?, Ella Fitzgerald.  Ditto.  There is, I am convinced, a place for more NYE music than currently exists.

Io Saturnalia!

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*--I'm not sure how that works either.
**--Exception: Linus and Lucy, although if someone later went all Mitchell Parish and retconned lyrics to that tune, I don't need to hear them.
***--See A South Park Christmas, where "Ding dong m'kay" makes perfect sense.

9 December 02013 (Happy birthday!): A Sense Of Humor At ESPN

In scanning the college bowl lineup last night, I was struck by something that, outside the states of Texas and Nevada, only a detail-obsessed academic would be likely to notice.  Fortunately or not, I am one of those.

On January 1, the Heart of Dallas Bowl will match North Texas against Nevada-Las Vegas.  Nothing remarkable about that, except...The president of UNLV recently stepped down, to become the president of--North Texas.

I choose to believe that this was not much of an accident and that, in the backroom machinations that led to this matchup, someone else thought that this would be a fun idea.

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8 December 02013: Observation From Last Night

Back when I was in college and Northwestern was just emerging from its record football losing streak, someone observed that NU's football team would never be taken seriously until and unless students stopped tearing down the goalposts and throwing them into Lake Michigan after every victory.

Which we eventually did.

In a similar vein, I submit that Michigan State students need to stop celebrating big wins/commiserating over losses by burning couches before theirs will be regarded as an elite football team.  Should that be their wish.

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3 December 02013: Some People Are So Sensitive...

...that one suspects they bathe with Woolite*.

Today's entry in "Lighten Up, America!" comes from Las Vegas, where this toy has been pulled from the shelves at the Rio Hotel and Casino:


Why, you ask?  Because it looks too much like a norovirus, such as the one which infected about 100 people there recently, and some parents complained.

The spokesman for the Rio had it right when he called this resemblance "an unfortunate coincidence".  That's all it is.  For my own part, I find it vaguely encouraging that people know what noroviruses look like, but this is overkill writ large.  I won't have a chance to stock up on these when I'm in LV in a couple of weeks, but I will want to.

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*--Apologies to George C.

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26 November 02013: It's the Tuesday Before Thanksgiving Again, Which Has Nothing To Do With The Subject Of This Entry

Back in the day, the Personal Management merit badge included a requirement that you consider various uses for $100*, one of which was "Hide it in a mattress".

At the time, this was regarded as a bad choice, and rightly so.  Now...I'm not so sure.  Recent news from the banking world includes the floating of a charge for depositing cash.  Couple that with homeopathic interest rates (.1% on savings, for example), and that mattress idea is starting to look pretty good.  It seems vaguely wrong that it should cost you money to have money.

I would, however, invest the first hundred or so in some kind of fireproofing.  That was a point made in the merit badge pamphlet.

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I have no real interest in what you were doing 50 years ago on any given day, including but not limited to this one.

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21 November 02013 (18 years later): It's A Great Country, But It's A Strange Culture*

Evidence continues to roll in in support of the theory that this country has a remarkable lack of understanding about what's really important, and a twisted set of priorities.  Today's data point is that the Gold and Silver Pawn shop, home of the TV show Pawn Stars, was recently voted the best sight in Las Vegas.

Better than this, for example.  There are at least five things in this picture that are a better sight than G&S Pawn:


Got that?  The site of a reality TV show won out (admittedly in an online poll, with all of the invalidity of that medium) over some of the most camera-friendly sites (both natural and man-made) in Nevada.  I've driven by G&S Pawn many times, and have never felt it necessary to take a picture of what is, to me, a nondescript storefront with a long line of people outside waiting to get in--to what end, I don't know.

This may be what happens when the voting public has, by and large, not been to Las Vegas and is voting off of their reality TV experience.  It's kind of depressing to realize that many of those people also vote in elections that matter.

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*--Credit to George Carlin for that line.

It has been said that if you owe a bank $100, that's your problem, but if you owe a bank $1,000,000, that's their problem.

In a similar vein: If you get a letter from your bank, you have a problem.  If you get eight letters from your bank in the same day's mail, the bank has a problem.

This happened to me yesterday.  An 8-check deposit got posted twice at the bank (which I will not name here*).  As one might expect, the bank's computer flagged the checks as "previously deposited".

Owing to the lack of a human, who might have seen that this was a problem on their end, I was greeted with the aforementioned pile of mail yesterday.  I didn't bother opening any of the letters past the second.  One phone call this morning cleared things up, but the sheer magnitude of the paper trail generated by the error will amuse me for some time to come.

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*--But I will name it here.  Chase.  As secretary/treasurer of the Michigan Section of the Mathematical Association of America, where I am in year 7 of what I was told would be a three-year commitment, I am required to deal with them.

17 November 02013 (Happy birthday!): Weather Update

There's a "high wind" warning active in this corner of the world until 4:00 AM tomorrow.

After "Hurricane Albion", as the 11 September microburst is known in these parts, I am less concerned about this than I probably ought to be.

It is, after all, the high winds you don't get warned about that cause the most damage.

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15 November 02013 (Happy birthday!): A Bad Idea In All Ways But One

In re: NBC's upcoming "The Sound of Music Live!" project:

On the one hand, I am encouraged by the fact that the Peacock powers that be have resisted the temptation to set this unnecessary revival somewhere other than Nazi-occupied Austria.  I'm sure someone somewhere along the line pitched the notion of updating the story and moving it to 21st-century Nashville or Hollywood, or somewhere else in spacetime.

Other than that, this strikes me as a bad idea that will nonetheless be a ratings success.  It still does not make "My Favorite Things" into a Christmas song.

Nothing will.

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13 November 02013: 48 Days To Go (No Pressure)

The book is in the home stretch, and that means I've been working a lot on getting the index into shape.  (I know, I should have written the index first, and then I'd've known on which pages to mention everything else, which would have made the writing go more smoothly.  AMBO*.)  This means a lot of very close staring at the computer code for the text** and teasing out where I need references inserted that will generate the index.

Which is a terrible strain on my already-not-quite-up-to-par eyes.  I don't know how professional indexers (indicers?) do this for a living.  I suspect that they started out with better vision than I enjoy.

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*--Another Magnificent Blown Opportunity.
**--I'm writing in L_AT^EX, the standard mathematical word processing software that does amazing things with equations and mathematical symbols.  It's not "what you see is what you get" like WordPerfect or Word, so there's a compiling step that generates camera-ready copy which can't be edited directly.

Here's a little musical number curiously appropriate for the Bollmanic Thanksgiving of 02013:


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7 November 02013: Trivia Pursued

One of the annual features of the honors program at AC is a students vs. faculty Trivial Pursuit game.  Ever since I've been teaching in Honors, the game has been scheduled more or less at my convenience, occasionally to the dismay of the students.  In 02009, the minutes of the student Honors Council after the match included a report on the event with the notation "Mark Bollman is not invited next time."

As notoriety goes, this is a pretty good version.  A copy of those minutes, with the offending laudatory passage highlighted, is posted on the wall outside my office.

Last night was the 02013 match, and while the 12-student team jumped out to a 5-2 lead, the four faculty triumphed again.  Part of the reason for the students' unexpected lead is that they were better than most years at not talking themselves out of the right answer (which is usually amusing to watch, and a good reason why 12-person teams in TP are not a good idea), part is that recent editions of the game seem to be relying a little more heavily than seems right on multiple-choice questions.  I don't think they'd've gotten "In what year was the first human-to-human heart transplant performed?" without the list of choices, which was 01967, 01977, and 01987.

Another reason for the faculty win was the students' choice on the final question.  Apparently our skill with geography was well-concealed, as they chose one of my stronger categories at the end.  The final question involved African flags, and while it too was multiple-choice, I didn't need the options.  There's only one African flag that has a bayonet, a hoe, and a book on it.

Mozambique for the win.

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4 November 02013: The Seinfeld Chronicles, Part 1

Back on 13 January, I announced on this page that I would soon watch an episode of Seinfeld for the first time in a decade and see how it held up.

I didn't get to that very quickly (it was August) and I'm only getting around to reporting on it now.  Life happens sometimes.

I went into this project with a couple of firm beliefs, and sought to confirm or deny them:

1. In any given episode, two of the four main characters are behaving so badly that I wanted to reach into the screen and slap some sense into them.

Still true.  Of course, that was a point made in the series finale.  Not having watched a lot of episodes in the 02010's, I can't make any sweeping claims yet, but this has not been discredited.

2. Julia Louis-Dreyfus could have transferred her entire character from Elaine to Christine from The New Adventures of Old Christine without skipping a beat.  This is not intended as complimentary.

Confirmed.  (Note that the entire run of Old Christine was during my Seinfeld hiatus.)  Some actors get so typecast that they're described as "just playing themselves".  Dennis Miller is one example--see Disclosure or Murder at 1600 for examples.  To the extent that J L-D is like either of those characters, this is correct here.  Since I find both characters annoying, this is not a good thing.

3. In a similar vein, Patrick Warburton could have morphed David Puddy right over to Jeff Bingham on  Rules of Engagement without missing a beat, either.  This one is meant favorably.

Unconfirmed, yet.  He was not in any of the few episodes I've watched so far.  But this makes a lot of sense to me.

In general: So far, the show holds up, although it's pretty clearly a reflection of the 01990's (Lack of cell phones, for one.  However, Frasier, which debuted in 01993, had a far greater cell phone presence.)  There are a lot of places where I found myself recognizing things that the show inspired in later sitcoms.

More to follow when I get around to re-watching more episodes.

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3 November 02013: Back To Standard

One big difference between digital and analog clocks has to be the ease of converting back to standard time.  I have 9 working clocks* in my office, 5 analog and 4 digital, and this afternoon was an excursion in moving them all an hour back.  For the analog clocks, it's easy: just wind the hands or dial backwards 360° (Exception: Cuckoo clocks, many of which should not be rotated backwards--but my cuckoo clock lives at home and not in-office.).

For a digital clock, moving the time back an hour is usually done by moving it forward either 11 or 23 hours.  That takes a little more time and requires that close attention be paid, lest you go too far past the desired time.  No doubt about it, implementing DST digitally in March is easier than withdrawing from it in November..

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*--Excluded from this count are my office computer and several calculators with clocks built in, if for no other reason than there's not a one of them that I use as a clock.

2 November 02013: A Different Kind Of Too-Early Sighting

Today's quiz: What do the following four songs have in common?

• 76 Trombones
• God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
• Bridge Over Troubled Water
• Hot Hot Hot

Answer: These four tunes comprised the halftime show at Albion's final home football game* of the season.  Really.

I feel quite safe in saying that there's nothing less obscure that connects this playlist.  The theme for the show was "The Four Seasons".  Apparently Vivaldi's works haven't all been scored for marching band yet.  Fair enough.

That having been said, November 2 is too early for Christmas music on the radio, and it's certainly too early for Christmas music on a football field.

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*--Final score: Current employer 42, Former employer whom I left with great acrimony on both sides 28.  It's safe to say that I enjoyed the outcome more than anyone else in the stadium.

Another Halloween has come and gone, and my streak of never having a trick-or-treater come to my home in my adult life continues unbroken.

It's not like I've deliberately sought out that distinction.  A look at my residential history makes this a not-all-that-unreasonable development.  Among the highlights:

• Three Halloweens living on a dirt road (called a "highway" by optimistic township planners) far from pedestrian traffic.
• Three years living on various streets without sidewalks and with a 55 mph speed limit.  Also not exactly pedestrian-friendly.
• Three years living on upper floors of apartment complexes not themselves home to many (or any) children.
  
• Twelve years (and counting) living on a dead-end street with houses on only one side of the road, where the long walk back seems to be a major deterrent.  Given my track record at my current address, it's possible that this will continue for years to come.
  

Or it could be non-geographical and just that I've been a frightening presence in my various neighborhoods.

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I've exhausted my supply of patience for the superstitious impeding the progress of humanity.

what a "microburst" is, here's a link to the final analysis on the one that hit Albion yesterday afternoon.

If you've never had the full microburst experience, the rain was running pretty much parallel to the ground, and the windows at my office complex looked for a time like they were under assault from a fire hose.  Certainly not a dull half hour, but we didn't seem to be in much real danger.

The damage was substantial, but not rising to the level of catastrophic.  I admit that I might think differently if it was my car that was under one of the fallen trees.  The head of Linden Ave. was blocked by a large branch for about 20 hours, such that walking or swimming were the only ways off the street, but that's been fixed now.  No power at home yet, but the college is coming back on the grid and online.

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6 September 02013: Magic/Tragic

On Wednesday night, the Tigers' magic number to clinch the AL Central Division was 17.  On Wednesday night, they gave up 17 unanswered runs in a 20-4 loss to Boston.

I submit that this is a record for "number of unanswered runs surrendered = magic number", although I have seen nothing in the mainstream sports media about this.  Surely some computer jockey well-versed in the art of data-mining can chime in on this vital issue.

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For the 45th time in my life, it's the first day of school.

One would think I'd've gotten the hang of that by now.  Sadly, no.

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Yep, classes start tomorrow around here.

1. Evidently, folks on St. Croix think I look more like Jerry Garcia (3 "sightings", all from USVI residents) than Zach Galifianakis (0).  I think that this is because my hair is running a little longer and as a result, a little (a lot?) grayer than ZG's.  I hope it's not because I look like a walking dead man*.

2. The rest of the trip to St. Croix was very pleasant, and a needed escape for both of us.

3. I was in a restaurant in Maybrook, New York a few weeks back, and was rereading the new Allan Sherman biography while waiting for my food.  A waitress asked what I was reading, which was an unusual expression of interest that I don't usually get when reading in public.  I told her, and she immediately asked who Allan Sherman was.

Fair enough.  I'm not of the belief that Sherman is such a fundamental figure in American culture that it's a major character flaw if a young person hasn't heard of him.  (It's not like he's been alive in the memory of most Americans, for example.  Myself included--I have no memory of his 01973 death.)  When I tried to explain who he was by citing "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh"--still no recognition.

That I find a bit depressing.  Sherman himself may have descended into obscurity**, but that song has earned some level of permanence in the Great American Novelty Songbook, and should probably be wider-known.

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*--Or, for that matter, a walking Dead man.
**--A descent that is, probably for the first time and certainly never before as completely, documented in this new book.

5 August 02013: Off The Road And Online

Pennsylvania has been described as "Pittsburgh in the west, Philadelphia in the east, and Alabama in between."  Whoever came up with that description probably drove across the Keystone State on I-80, as I did twice last week.

Now I've yet to make it to Alabama, but if "lots of unremarkable empty space" is what was meant by that comment, then it's certainly accurate.  The scenery is reasonably pleasant--it's not like driving through the emptiness that is Iowa, for example--but the folks in Pennsylvania seem to be reaching to claim something distinctive along that corridor.  True story: Near mile marker 111 (of course), there's a roadside sign declaring that it's the location of "the highest point on I-80 east of the Mississippi River".

There were not a lot of people lined up to get their picture taken in front of that sign.

Of course, I was passed by a car bearing a license plate (a dealer plate, actually, which adds to the mystery) from Belize, so it's vaguely possible that part of Central America finds a 2250-foot "peak" worth driving way out of their way for.

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I have reason to think that, the next time I order a new pair of glasses, the optician will gather everyone in the office around to look at me, saying something like, "There's the last customer we have who still wants glass lenses over plastic."  The scene was very close to that eleven days ago when I ordered my next pair (Incidentally: It appears that my eyes are improving with age.  While my first reaction was "Wow.  That almost never happens.", cool reflection reminded me that, short of total blindness, there's not much room for them to go any way but upward.).

I should have told my eye doctor that, on my way to the appointment, I had dropped eight rolls of film to be developed, thus establishing my bona fides as an active user of old technology.  While my reasons for preferring glass over plastic (in short, I'm used to a fair amount of weight on my face, and the one time I experimented with plastic lenses was very disorienting) passed muster this time around, I don't know how much longer this will work.  There's a point when quirkiness crosses over into pointless clinging to the past, and if I haven't crossed over yet, I'm surely not far away.

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So what's been going on this month just past?

1. Laura is applying for librarian jobs, including some at colleges.  This has resulted in an amusing trivia question: "I'll take 'Colleges and Universities' for $400, Alex":

    The answer: Saint Mary's College of Indiana.
    What is the only college to turn down both of us for jobs?

I made it slightly further than she did, advancing to the campus interview stage in 02001.  (Incidentally, for reasons that no one I talked to back then seems to understand, SMC never abbreviates itself to "St. Mary's".)

2. News for the universe: NYCFC is the name of a financial institution, not a professional soccer team.  What Major League Soccer is doing to team nicknames (Sporting Kansas City?  Toronto FC?  Real Salt Lake?) is visually unpleasant, albeit probably not out of line with professional soccer elsewhere on the planet*.

3. While I am paying as little attention as possible to the birth in England yesterday that's gathering a lot of headline space**, I would really like it if Will and Kate would work "Scooter" in among their child's three or four names.  "King Scooter" has a great ring to it.

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*--I will agree that, as bad as "FC Dallas" is, it's an improvement over "Dallas Burn".
**--Again: we fought a war to get away from these people.

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24 June 02013: The Inexorable March Of Progress Something

...has claimed another victim.

In the 01980's and 01990's, I was one to defend part of USA Today against its "McPaper" deriders by citing the quality of its sports section.  It was long my belief that that section alone would be worth half the price of the paper even as it constituted only 25% of the newsprint.

The clock may have run out on that bargain.  Last Tuesday, the paper devoted a full page (1/8) of the sports section to its "All-Time All-USA High School Baseball Team".  When I turned to that page, I initially thought it was an advertisement masquerading as a news story.  The list was sponsored by American Family Insurance, but this was no ad.

Surely there was something else going on in sports that could have filled that space.  Even a nostalgic callback to "Sports News From All 50 States", which was discontinued many years back, would have been an improvement.

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If you ever find yourself driving in the vicinity of Davenport, Iowa, stop in at Dahl Ford and get your car's oil changed.  My recent adventures en route home from Kansas City (~380,000 AP Calculus exams this year) have left me somewhat in their debt, and this endorsement, while not the least I can do, is surely not far from that.  Here's the story as relayed to my AP grading friends:

Good news: I made the drive from KC to Albion in 13 hours, 40 minutes.

Bad news: It would have been at least an hour less, but my Check Engine and Power Train Fault lights came on in succession just outside Davenport. 

Good news: Since I am not Penny from The Big Bang Theory, I thought that this should be addressed.  I limped (literally--it turns out that "limp mode" is not a statistics term, but an automotive one) into town and, after a false start involving a well-meaning but confused Wal-Mart employee, found Dahl Ford at about 4:20 PM.

Bad news: I explained the situation, including the fact that I live in Michigan and not Iowa or Illinois*, to the service manager, who told me that he might be able to fit me in between the appointments already booked for the very full next day.  I asked if there were any other places in the area who might be able to assist me either more quickly or more surely.

Good news: Another employee overheard this conversation and offered to fast-track my car to the top of the list, and so they were able to look at it right away.  About 60 minutes and one replaced TP sensor later, I was back on the road.  Most of the cost was covered by an extended service plan I didn't know I had.

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If you should ever find yourself at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and enjoying the hospitality of their in-house catering service, I would suggest avoiding the mango chicken.

It may just have been me, but while attending the 15th International Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking there last week, I got a nasty case of food poisoning that I've tentatively blamed on ascribed to that dish.  This caused me to miss a panel of former members of the MIT blackjack team, which was definitely a disappointment.  Other than that, however, the conference was very interesting.

With that trip, I have successfully taught my current online course from two different states, with a third to come next week.  This Internet thing might turn out to be useful for something after all.

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First, though, a definition:

            college summer (n): The time on a college's calendar between spring commencement and the start of fall classes, which may or may not bear any relationship to any other definition of summer.

We're now in week 2 of Albion's college summer, and my status that I'm "as busy as I want to be" is fully activated.  Indeed, I may be more busy than I want to be.  Herewith, a rundown of recent events out here in 517-land:

1. I continue chipping away at the book ("the book" being my local term for BGM:NBN, because the lack of vowels in that initialism makes it too hard to pronounce [and thus turn into an acronym*]), which now has a Web page, a projected price, and an ISBN.  I'll be doing some field research at a number of sites in southern Nevada next week.

2. Albion's initial excursion into online teaching has launched, and I'm onboard teaching a section of precalculus.  At double the standard speed and entirely self-directed, this is sure to be an adventure for everyone involved.

3. Two AC students will be returning to campus shortly to do some undergraduate research under my direction.  We'll be looking at ways to modify the real number system (and other systems with nice properties) to allow division by zero.

4. The countdown to Kansas City and the annual academic marathon that is AP Calculus grading is now under three weeks.

5. My application (of sorts) for promotion to full professor has been approved by the necessary on-campus officials, so I'll be able to drop "Associate" from my official title this fall.

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*--Acronyms are sets of initials that are pronounced as a word, as with RADAR, SCUBA, or MATH Challenge.  Initialisms are sets of initials that are pronounced as letters, as with NFL, IRS, or  NCIS.

I have long chosen to live by the maxim "Growing old is mandatory.  Growing up is optional."  That commitment took something of a hit yesterday.

As some of you know, I have "official" pictures of my 11 nephices on the wall above my desk at work.  Very occasionally, someone who doesn't get that an 11-child family is pretty much an anachronism in 02010's America (as well as pretty unrealistic for a small-college math professor) will ask if they're my kids.

Fair enough.  In answering, I get a chance to continue my ongoing quest to promote the word "nephices" to as wide an audience as possible, so it's all good.

Yesterday, though...One of my students gestured toward the Wall of Nephices and asked "Are those your grandkids?".

Even without extreme examples of family planning gone wild that Laurie can describe in detail from her former profession, that's probably not a completely unreasonable assumption for the younger end of the Gang of Eleven.  As a glimpse into the line of questioning I'm likely to hear more often in the future, though, I could have waited for it.

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Another one of those "minutiae of life" milestones has passed, and since that's one of the reasons for this web page, here's what's going on: Late last month, I signed a contract with CRC Press to publish a book, Basic Gambling Mathematics: The Numbers Behind the Neon, that I wrote last summer.  I'll be pulling it into final form for the rest of this year, and it should be out sometime in the first half of 02014.

This started out last summer as a distraction from the world and a quest to write something that did what I wanted done, mathematically, for my Chance class.  One of the challenges in teaching that class was finding a textbook that did the math I needed for what I was doing in there without flooding the students with too much advanced stuff.  In the true spirit of "If you want something done right, then do it yourself", I...did.  BGM:NBN started out as a textbook, then became a more general book on gambling math, and finally came around to my original plan after some feedback from the publisher.  If all goes well, there will be a solutions manual and a Web site with some Java applets to facilitate some simulations of the ideas in the book.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

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I recently saw the trailer for The Hangover, Part III.  I suspect that my noteworthy resemblance to Zach Galifianakis may be in its 14th minute.

I submit that about a week ago, it would have been possible to make some money betting with folks on whether or not there had ever been a Pope Francis.  Even casual observers of Catholicism, I believe, would have guessed that someone over the past couple thousand years had taken on that name.

Surprisingly (perhaps), no, and now that window has closed.

Well-played, Father Jorge.

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Okay, so the world has calmed down a little bit in these parts, so it's back to the burning questions o' the day.  Ron from Palm Beach Gardens, FL points out the following about the Olympics and wrestling:


Jaundice aside, I think there's something there about promoting sports in eastern Asia, which is undeniably the next major growth region for televised sports.  Table tennis and badminton--both big in China and southeast Asia--have both been targeted by pro-wrestling* forces as marginal sports that are taking up valuable space.  While this would at least be a rational argument for ditching wrestling--which has more of a following in western Asia--I think it's stretching a point to claim that this is the reason for that deletion, and anyone at IOC HQ who seriously advances that is incorrect.

On another front, Steve from Allen Park, MI has this observation:

Response to the Olympic wrestling decision has been existent, to the extent that this is one of those rare times that The Markives needs a comment section.  Before getting back to that, here's some leftover news from yesterday:


Big sucker, too.  So much so that he/she was initially unable to turn around inside the live trap.  Somewhere on the drive to an undisclosed secure location far (in raccoon terms) from Albion, the animal managed to reverse direction, which made it easier to let her/him free.

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12 February 02013 (Happy Darwin Day!): A Puzzling Decision, And I Am Not Easily Puzzled*

Today's news includes the decision by the International Olympic Committee recommending that wrestling be dropped from the 02020 Summer Games.  Let's break this down:

1. The decision to drop both baseball and softball beginning in 02012 was based, in part, on two issues:
        A. Facilities, in that a baseball/softball stadium is typically a venue not used for other sports.  That doesn't apply to wrestling--roll out some differently-marked mats on the gymnastics arena floor (since that artistic exhibition isn't going anywhere anytime soon), and you're good to go.
        B. Lack of competitiveness on an international level, as typified by domination of Olympic competition by one or two nations.  That doesn't seem to be an issue here, either.  Indeed, in the upcoming battle to reinstate Olympic wrestling, we finally have a fight where the USA, Russia, and Iran (all strong wrestling countries) are on the same side.  This may do more for international understanding than anything the UN has ever done.

2. A lot of press coverage seems to be focused on how modern pentathlon is still in the Olympics.  A lot of that coverage comes down to "tradition".  Wrestling, with its origins at the original ancient Games, would seem to have that in spades.  By contrast, rhythmic gymnastics is far newer and far more silly.  Beach volleyball is not exactly dripping with historical significance.  Nor yet synchronized swimming.  Trampolining wasn't a pursuit of the Pythagoreans, either.

3. One sport will be added for 02020, come the IOC's fall meeting.  On the list along with wrestling are baseball/softball, squash, karate, wushu, roller sports, wakeboarding and "sports climbing".  Several of those aren't sports, and a couple of others are closer to judged exhibitions.  I have a hard time imagining that people will tune in across the world to watch coverage of squash, whether live or on tape delay, nor do  I foresee too many complaints about the ESPN2 crawl giving away the sports climbing medalists.

Is this a mistake?  I think so.  I'm not sure what the big picture is at IOC HQ: if they're aiming to cut out sports which are less mediagenic, there are probably better choices than wrestling--archery and shooting don't appear to be on the endangered list, for example.  (And I'd keep those, truth be told.)

If the goal is to find room for emerging new sports, which is about the only way I could see "sports climbing" being even remotely justified, then I think an easier solution would be to relax the Winter Olympics' rule that all of its sports involve either ice or snow, and shift basketball and boxing there--but they should still find room for downhill skating.

To be honest, the Olympics could lose boxing entirely and I wouldn't object, but I suspect that that gets decent enough TV ratings.

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*--Steve of Allen Park, MI suggested this topic just as I had begun writing about it.  Great minds and all that...

The big news o' the day, accounting for four "breaking news" emails when I got to work today, is Benedict XVI's resignation as Pope.  Look for a surge of interest in Gregory XII, the last Pope to step down voluntarily.

Look also for a photograph of Ben 16 with his successor, provided he survives that long.  A photograph of two living Popes would be another one of those once-in-several-lifetimes things, as Greg 12 stepped down in 01415, well before the invention of the camera.

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As a numismatist, I was interested in the notion of the President ordering the minting of a trillion-dollar* platinum coin, but I was more interested in this possibility as an American citizen with a keen appreciation of the bizarre.

Just once--Just.  Once.--I would like to see the government actually do one of these crazy things that are proposed from time to time in response to the world in the first quarter of the 21st century.  I suspect that the eventual consequences would turn out not to be all that dire after all, and life in the immediate aftermath would be a great deal more interesting

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*--Something that's been bugging me a lot more than it should lately is the tendency of people to refer to this as a "$1 trillion dollar" coin.  Either the dollar sign or the word "dollar", people.  You don't need both, and your use of both undercuts your argument--no matter which way you're arguing--by causing people to question your intelligence.  Or at least it should.

13 January 02013: Back Online, And In Phase Two

At some point in the next few weeks, I will, for the first time in 10 years, watch an episode of Seinfeld and perhaps see if all of the fuss is justified. 

Her's what's going on: At the tail end of 02002, I decided to stop watching the show for a year.  This was motivated in part by some press coverage at the time lauding S. as the greatest TV show of all time, which I thought was a bit premature.  I am a fan of the "test of time" criterion for judging greatness, and to me, this show had not fulfilled that requirement.  One way to pass that test is to go away for awhile, and since the syndication market wasn't going to put the show aside for any great amount of time, I did so on a personal level.  There was also something of an "overfamiliarity" component--on seeing the first few seconds, I was at a point where I could identify all four story lines.  And usually I wanted to reach into the screen and strangle two of the four primary characters for behaving like fools.

Which was, of course, sort of the point of the show.

One year became two, then three, then...somehow a decade seemed about right.  In an ideal world, I'd jump back in at the start of the series, but that may or may not be feasible.  More to follow.

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