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Frost’s “Mending Wall” may tell us that “good fences make good neighbors”, but I am not so sure.  I have a pretty shoddy fence, but my neighbors are all fine people.  Just this afternoon, my neighbors Trish and Andy helped me move some very heavy furniture.  When she saw the truck in my driveway she said, “Oh no! You’re not moving, are you?”  They mail a Christmas card every year, too, even though our houses are only fifty feet apart.  They’ve given nice gifts, like plants and hummingbird feeders.  The decrepit fence between our houses may keep their cows on their side, and my elves on mine, but neither of us is too worried about it.

Filed under: House, Literature and Books, Musings on March 6th, 2010 | No Comments »

The 2010 Winter Olympics concluded this week, and I could hardly have watched more of them if I wanted.  I tuned in every night for two weeks, and even though there were sports I didn’t care to see (snowboarding, ice dancing, etc.), and even though I wish NBC weren’t so captivated by a cult of personality, focusing too much attention on big celebrity athletes, I enjoyed most of it a great deal.  And, in spite of the fact that the weather sometimes didn’t fully cooperate, and some of the venues experienced technical difficulties, Vancouver seems the ideal place for Olympic games.

But not everyone likes the idea of the Olympics moving from city to city, country to country.  In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Monday, former Olympic rower, Charles Banks-Altekruse, argues that the Olympic games–both summer and winter–should move permanently to Switzerland.

Banks-Altekruse correctly points out that the Olympics are hugely expensive events that can be financially crippling to the host cities and countries.  Part of Greece’s present fiscal turmoil is due, no doubt, to the 2004 games in Athens.  Meanwhile, I clearly remember how worried people were about whether the Olympic facilities and venues would be complete in time for the games.  The paint was still drying when the 2004 Olympics began.  That Greece had to build arenas and a stadium from scratch is emblematic of what makes the Olympics so costly for host cities.  Beijing built hugely expensive facilities that now lie dormant.  Sochi is building a new Olympic park from scratch that will, no doubt, cost a fortune. Rio de Janeiro will spend billions of dollars it simply doesn’t have to host the 2016 summer games.

Atlanta spent tons of money, too, but did things a bit smarter.  The stadium that hosted the opening and closing ceremonies as well as track and field in 1996 was converted to host baseball after the games concluded.  Other Olympic events were held at facilities at universities in northern Georgia.  Los Angeles, too, used existing infrastructure in 1984, and made money.  But times have changed, and expectations have changed.  I suspect that, like professional sports teams do, the International Olympic Committee now expects the latest and greatest, and an old stadium–the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was over sixty-years-old when the 1984 games began–simply wouldn’t do.

Meanwhile, Banks-Altekruse argues that potential political conflicts like the one that thwarted his Olympic hopes in Moscow in 1980, and kept Eastern Bloc nations away from Los Angeles in 1984, make it essential that the Olympics find a permanent, neutral home.  I acknowledge that that was a big shame, and, in retrospect, neither of those cities was the ideal choice, since the IOC certainly must have realized that boycotts would occur.

But I think the political climate around the world have changed in the past twenty-five years, and I doubt that we will see another significant Olympic boycott, unless future games are, somehow, awarded to Tibet or Somalia.

And, though the financial issue is a serious matter, I don’t believe that that justifies moving the Olympics permanently to Switzerland, which would, according to Banks-Altekruse, be able to afford its hosting duties by averaging out the construction costs over a long term.

No, I think too much is gained by having the Olympics move around the world.  The experience seems richer, and the international goodwill, I believe, is genuine.

Filed under: Current Events, Musings, Politics, Sports on March 4th, 2010 | No Comments »

Fifty years ago, if you had asked any American kid what the future would look like, he probably would have told you we’d have flying cars, robot butlers, jet packs, and so on.  He wouldn’t have predicted we’d all be fatter than ever, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, driving cars that look much less cool than the ones he could see cruising on his shiny new, wide-open Interstate.  None of that boy’s predictions may have come to pass, but I experienced the future last night, and it was amazing.

We went to Best Buy last Saturday and bought a Blu-ray disc player.  I had seen one at a friend’s house last year, and the picture was incredible.  But I expected it to be.  Since the introduction of the DVD player, video quality has been steadily improving.  HDTV, of course, has been the greatest leap forward.  But the Blu-ray player is much more than high-definition video.  It’s Netflix.

I must be the last of my friends to use Netflix, an online video store that sends DVDs to members through the mail, which they then watch and return.  That process is fairly low-tech, and never struck me as the most convenient way to watch movies, though I had to admire Netflix’s selection.

Recently, visiting friends, I have seen that Netflix now offers streaming video, which can be accessed via fancy game consoles or a Blu-ray player.  Harris and Kat, and Ryan and Karla showed us how they could select from a seemingly unlimited number of Netflix films to watch instantly on their TVs through internet streaming.  My prognosticating skills are apparently limited, because I never thought streaming video was the future.  That is, I thought slow internet connections and limited hard-drive space were significant obstacles.  Who, I wondered, would spend hours downloading a movie, which will take up a ton of space on his or her computer, and which he or she will have to watch on a tiny computer screen?  That’s not how it works, it turns out.

On Monday morning I hooked up our new Blu-ray player, moved around some wires so I could connect it to the cable modem, and then signed up for Netflix.  Last night we experienced the magic.  We went to the Netflix website, selected the exact movie Miriam wanted to see at that moment, added it to our “instant” cue.  Then, magically, that title appeared on our TV screen.  I pressed play, the Blu-ray player spent thirty seconds or less downloading the movie–or at least it began downloading the movie–then the film began.  The picture was widescreen, looked as good as a DVD, sounded as good, too, and played flawlessly without any skips or blips for the entire duration of the film.  I could barely believe it.  Miriam and I high-fived each other.

So, now there are countless movies and TV shows that we have ready to watch whenever we sit down in front of the television.  Plus, we can still get physical DVDs and Blu-ray discs in the mail.  I’m expecting Parsifal today.

We’re living in the future!  What does it cost?  Less than nine dollars a month.  Since we canceled the premium channels on our cable, were saving money.  Huzzah!

Filed under: Film, Friends, Musings, Technology on February 24th, 2010 | No Comments »

[The following was written last August.  I haven't gotten around to publishing it until now.]

Have you ever been unsure whether to use “I” or “me”?  These pronouns, in particular, are frequent targets of hypercorrection.  As children, we were scolded when we asked, “Mommy, can Billy and me go to the park?”  “May Billy and I go to the park”, came the correction.  Consequently, you may often hear people say, “And then the police came and arrested Billy and I”.  By then, however, our mothers are not there to tell us that we should have said “Billy and me”.

People get confused about whether to use “I” or “me” because they often cannot distinguish between a subject and an object.  In my first example above, “Billy and I” are the subjects; in my second example, “the police” is the subject, and “Billy and me” are the objects.  I know this isn’t the National Grammar Rodeo, but I bring it up because my concept of language has completely changed in the last two years.  Some of the change is attributable to my getting a degree in English.  For the most part, however, the change came about because I wanted to learn German.

German does something that English, by and large, does not: it declines.  Declension is a feature of some languages that alters nouns, pronouns, and adjectives to indicate gender, possession, number, and case (that is, direct- or indirect object).  As I showed above, “I” and “me” are merely different versions of the same concept, like “she” and “her”, “he” and “him”, and their possessive equivalents, “hers” and “his”.  Those pronouns are also among the few English words that demonstrate gender.  English also declines by adding an “s” or “es” to the end of most nouns to change their number.  But that is relatively simple, and, for the most part, marks the end of English declension.  German, on the other hand, declines in every way imaginable, and it is a nightmare.

In English, we take for granted that the articles “a” (or “an”) and “the” are all we need to know.  Germans have these articles, too, of course, but, like many languages that distinguish gender, they are different for masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns:  der Baum (the tree) is masculine; die Lilie (the lily) is feminine; and, oddly, das Mädchen (the girl) is neuter.  In German, the gender of a word seems to have little relation to its concept, and aside from the article, no indication of gender is given, unlike Spanish, for instance, where a word ending in “o” is likely masculine, and so on.  With German, you must learn the article with the word.  But, those articles you see above only count when the word is used in the nominative case.  If, for example, “der Baum” is not used as the subject of a sentence, but as the direct object, it becomes “den Baum”.  If the tree is the indirect object, it becomes “dem Baum”.  And the feminine “die Lilie”, when used as an indirect object, becomes “der Lilie”.  In order to know, then, that the lily is a feminine noun and not masculine, you have to understand how the sentence functions.  “Das Mädchen”, which we know is neuter, uses the same article as a masculine noun in the dative case, and becomes “dem Mädchen”.

Should you wish to indicate that you possess something–let’s say a tree–in English, you need only say “my”, no matter how the sentence is structured: “My tree is tall” (subject); “I climbed my tree” (direct object); “I gave some water to my tree” (indirect object).  Even when indicating that the tree possesses something, we still use “my”: “I climbed up to my tree’s highest bough”.  In German, those examples become, in order, “mein Baum”, “meinen Baum”, “meinem Baum”, and “meines Baum”.  All four of those mean “my tree” in English.

In English, “you” is always “you”, whether used as the subject, direct- or indirect object.  In German, “du” is the subject version of “you”: “You are my friend”.  “Dich” is the direct object version of “you”: “I love you” = “Ich liebe dich”.  “Dir” is the dative version of “you” used as an indirect object.

Don’t get me started on the adjective endings.

So, next time you meet a fluent German speaker, congratulate him.  He understands the functions of language way better than you.

Filed under: Musings, School on January 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

I am not a graphic designer, nor will I ever be, but I do love me some fonts.  I have for a long time – at least since I first got a computer in the mid-1990s.  You might not think so, but fonts and typefaces have militant advocates and critics.  On Flickr, for example, there is a group dedicated exclusively to mocking a font called Comic Sans.  On the other hand, I saw a film this year that was all about Helvetica.  I had never really given much thought to Helvetica, but the movie made me a big fan.  It’s a fine font.

In the New York Times today, Alice Rawsthorne writes about the use of anachronistic fonts in films and television.  She quotes a typography designer (that’s a real job?) who points out how odd it is that films in which enormous efforts are made to ensure accuracy in wardrobe and set design do not go to the same lengths to ensure typefaces that appear on screen are period-appropriate.  I have never looked for this when watching a movie, but, as I am constantly annoyed by anachronistic music in films (particularly diagetic music), I can’t deny anyone else the right to find font abuse upsetting.

Filed under: Musings on November 15th, 2009 | No Comments »