May 7, 2003
Old Yeller
Have you ever worked in an office where people just yell all day long for no apparent reason? That's where I work. One day I will come to work and there will not be a screaming match. One day, but not yesterday. Last year there were two full-time people in the Engineering department, plus me as summer help, so the howling was kept between the two full-time guys. This year, they've added another full-time guy and a temp. Since they seem to be uninterested in who can yell the loudest, you'd think that things might get better, but they really haven't. The blowups aren't quite as frequent, but they're just as intense and even more petty than last year. I spend way too much time just trying to stay out of the crossfire and avoid taking sides, because neither of them is ever completely right and I'll still have to work with both of them tomorrow.
Character sketches:
X is my boss. He's been here for a number of years, and he's in his mid-30's. He has a need to dominate people that puts him in conflict with quite a few people around him. As head of the department, any screw-ups get laid at his feet. He's also only one of two people in the department qualified to do real design work. This winds him even tighter than he is naturally and he feels the need to make clear exactly who is to blame for everything. He has strong ideas about the right course to follow in any situation. And he isn't a paragon of virtue by any stretch of the imagination.
Y is the next most senior guy in the department. He arrived there shortly before I did last year. He used to be in charge of Welding, but he got fed up with that and his boss that he transferred to Engineering. However, he's still the most competent welding guy we have so about half his time gets taken up resolving welding issues. This often prevents him from getting the training he needs to become a real designer, earning him X's anger. His will is almost as strong as X's and he's willing to be obnoxious, both of which don't score him points with X. Putting them together is a combustible mix, and fireworks are often the result.
April 30, 2003
I like books
Books make me happy, and I hope they always will. I'm on a non-fiction essay kick right now, which is proving very entertaining. The most recent book I finished was The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell. Sarah is a contributor to This American Life on NPR and has such a deep love of history and politics that she won me over instantly. "TPCP" is a collection of essays that are mostly tied together by those selfsame historical and political thoughts. And what's best is that she can't stop thinking about the contradictions involved in being an American. If you're proud of your history, did you forget about the Indian Wars? Why do people insist that unity is the only way these days? Why do people dis Pop-A-Shot? A lot of space is devoted to the 2000 election, with Vowell clearly and emphatically on the side of Al Gore (she cried through the Bush inauguration). In one memorable essay, she explores the race as jock vs. nerd. Al Gore has been criticized since the early '80's for being King of the Geeks, beginning with his ecological knowledge. George W. Bush, on the other hand, has been reported to have gotten in the race because he was upset to keep "intellectual pretension" out of politics. Gore's problem, she concludes, is that the public saw Gore first as the teacher's pet who always was showing you what he knew, when he should have taken his cue from Willow on Buffy: If you're going to be a nerd, you better be a self-deprecating one. Instead, Gore tried to be cool, which he failed miserably at. You have to embrace your nerddom, but don't be cocky about it. Love knowledge, but don't pretend it's cool.
Squarely in the "Light Nonfiction" category is Kevin Murphy's A Year At The Movies, in which he sets out to see a movie a day for a year. The ground rules are that he has to see one movie publicly exhibited each day, but he doesn't have to see 365 different movies. He sets out on his quest and writes mostly of cinemagoing as experience. Topics like where to sit, what to do if you don't like the projection quality, what sort of theater it's best to see a movie in, etc. are examined more than the actual movies themselves. Murphy's most hated target is the Vanity Project, where a bunch of talented actors appear in a doomed-from-the-start picture like Town & Country (to which an entire chapter is devoted). T&C's $50,000,000 budget could have been used on a dozen independent films, almost all of which are guaranteed to be at least as good as the studio-endorsed dreck that is Town & Country. Oh, and Corky Romano sucks hardcore. The year helps put the cinephile Murphy back in touch with what made him love going to the movies in the first place, which is surprising given that he sat through Serendipity five times and had to see The Princess Diaries. But he also had the pleasure of introducing his four-year-old nephew to the movies with Monsters, Inc., viewing movies all over the world, and seeing Amelie a whole lot.
I saw Amelie myself a couple nights ago and it never fails to delight. But I'm forever trying to recapture that moment in the State Theater when I absolutely fell in love with this film. For me, it's what movie magic is all about. Jean-Pierre Jeunet sets us up with this delightfully elfin pixie and for a hundred and twenty minutes lets Audrey Tautou loose on the screen. The last twenty minutes of that movie were me silently willing Amelie to make the great leap and to get together with Nino Quincampoix. The last scene with the motorbike ride through the streets of Paris gave me such joy, aided by the score from Yann Tiersen, and I want to find a way back to it. Sure, the DVD is nice and all, but it isn't a cinemagoing experience, where I could tell that the rest of the audience was right there with me, willing it to move forward. It revitalized my faith in the romantic comedy. A good one can exist, and I've seen it. But, problematically, I have yet to recapture that feeling fully when I watch the DVD. It's still a favorite of mine, but I don't feel like it's quite as necessary anymore to immediately hop a plane and find Table No. 8 at the Two Windmills in the Paris neighborhood of Montmartre. Sigh. I guess I'll have to keep going to the movies, which isn't too bad as fates go.
April 29, 2003
Why you gotta be that way?
Worst violations of taste in
Craig's Best Bands Tournament.
1. Journey beats The Commodores
Journey is so white and so full of suck. The Commodores had the funk.
2. Huey Lewis and the News tied the Sex Pistols
Do you people have ears? Huey Lewis and the News are just a bar band that were lucky enough to live during the '80's. They had a few catchy tunes and were less sucktastic than some other '80's products. The Sex Pistols wrote the book on punk. As far as pre-packaged bands go, they're one of only two I'd ever listen to.
3. Rush advances over Radiohead
Rush? Rush?!! What the hell?! Why is Radiohead the object of your spite? O.K. Computer is one of the most amazing albums of the '90's, and though you may be put off by the inaccessability of some of their recent work it's hard to deny that songs like "The National Anthem" and "Idioteque" aren't great.
4. INXS wins tiebreaker over Ben Folds Five
I hate this I hate this I hate this. INXS always struck me as the poor man's U2, whereas Ben Folds Five did something almost unheard of in the '90's: They
put out albums that actually sounded alternative. Yeah, they were consistent within that sound, but it wasn't something any other band was about to put on the airwaves. And they were GOOD! You can be different and suck, but to be different and good is a thing of beauty.
5. ???
If I had to add a fifth for convention, I'd go with Genesis defeating The Mamas and the Papas, but Genesis used to be good and thus an argument can be made that this was a good way to go.
April 13-17, 2003
Three Entries In Search of Some Order
TRASHionals and Flying
LA ICT
Tying It All Together
March 25, 2003
Heaven is What You Make of It
The first fifteen pages of The Lovely Bones are some of the hardest I've ever read. It's not that the language is technically challenging or that it's stream of consciousness, it's that the words are simple and so carefully arranged to tell the story of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Susie Salmon by a neighborhood man. From heaven, Susie narrates the story of her death and moves on to tell the story of her family that remains on earth and the other people whose lives she touches. She describes her patch of heaven and what it's like to be able to see everything and influence nothing. But mostly she talks about the devastating toll her death places on her family. Her mother withdraws and flees from her remaining family. Her slightly younger sister is marked as "the dead girl's sister". Her four-year-old brother struggles to comprehend the world around him and how it's changed. And her father pursues her case and believes he's found her killer, but the police don't. The worst part is that he's right and nobody takes him seriously. It takes eight years for the shadows of death to recede far enough to admit some light back into the world. The Lovely Bones is the sort of book that makes you hurt when you put it down and stop reading to catch your breath. You ache inside for Susie and her family because such an astonishing evil has been visited on them and you want somehow for it all to be made better, or at least for them to pick up the pieces and start to move on. You want to see the killer caught so that his crimes stop. It's not because justice must be done, as he's far too addled and deranged for that to mean much, but just so that there's a concrete point that everyone can identify as the end. You want life to be lived once more by the people that are on Earth. I love this book, but it made me want to call my sister whenever I put it down.
March 20, 2003
Dogs Let Slip
Despite our best efforts, Saddam Hussein is probably not dead, nor is he likely to be anytime soon. This is because you can find his picture in the dictionary under both "paranoid" and "elusive". Still, it's worth taking a shot at him whenever he fills the scope. It would certainly shorten the war and that's a good thing.
March 18, 2003
Havoc Cried, Dogs Preparing to Slip
After twelve years of Saddam defying UN resolutions, a year and a half of the Bush administration trying to tie him to September 11, and four and a half months of semi-effective UN weapons inspections we're going to war. Our allies are the UK, Spain, and Bulgaria. Go team! It's not like I believe that we could have made the French enthusiastic supporters of this war, but I believe we could have gone about this a better way. Normally, the rest of the world doesn't hate us this much. But the case for war has been made haphazardly, shoddily, and as an afterthought. The Bush administration planned to go to war, and that's where they ended up. It seems like for the past few months they've just been trying to get everyone else to jump on their bandwagon, but they don't really care if you're on board or not. A cogent analysis of this dithering can be found in Slate, How Bush Made Enemies of Our Allies.
MOAB is also here to stay. 19,000 pounds of explosives could really ruin your day. It looks like psy-ops (psychological operations) will play a big role in this war. There has already been intense leafletting over cities and foxholes alike. Destroying the Iraqis' appetite for a fight would be a huge accomplishment and would save thousands of lives. No one really wants to see another Highway of Death. We finally stopped bombing that miserable stretch out of Basra not because we ran out of targets, but because the slaughter was too grim for even the pilots to bear. It was the main highway to Baghdad and ended the war littered with military trucks and tanks and with many, many more civilian cars, looted by the fleeing Iraqis in an attempt to reach "safety" in their homeland. A '78 Cutlass Cierra is not about to elude an F-16, however, and we were loath to see the perpetrators of so many atrocities in Kuwait escape to fight another day. So we turned the highway into a parking lot filled with charred corpses.
This is the sort of crap I hate to see, because it does nothing and does that nothing in the worst way possible. Military operations will not be disrupted to any significant degree. If they are disrupted, OUR soldiers could die. If you protest against the war, you are not stabbing our troops in the back. You are fulfilling your democratic right to make your opinion heard. You're letting your leaders know how you feel about their decisions and putting them on notice that they have to answer to you in the end. But this is just moronic.
March 12, 2003
Day Six, 15:03
So Comcast tells me now that the problem is with my splitter, because only a weak signal is reaching the modem and that I need to get a new splitter, which they'll send out with the techician tomorrow morning between 8:30 and 10:00AM. So hopefully I'll be able to publish what I'm writing sooner rather than later. I'm able to write this solely because I know a little basic html and I do it off of my home computer and FTP it to my storage space, making it unnecessary to be actually online when I write, which is helping to keep me sane.
Tonight is Engineering Quiz Bowl out on North Campus, so I'll be missing my second UAC meeting and my second meeting in a row, good heavens, but we're doing "outreach" so it's cool. Part of the reason that Black History Quiz Bowl was so much fun was that you usually get a better reaction out of people who are just there to have fun instead of people who are out to win championships. Our teams are very, very good but sometimes you wouldn't know we're having fun. A lot of people act like the questions are out to get them, that the extra current events tossup was written to spite them. What you get from amateurs is humility. They're really happy when they get questions, instead of being mad that they didn't get more, and I think it's important to see that more.
Some people play quiz bowl to stomp other people and to prove that their intellect is superior. I've got news for them, it just so happens that you're good at this one thing. It doesn't mean that you're smarter than anyone else, just that you're good at assembling these types of clues. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent, yet I tend to be hopeless at certain varieties of brain-teasers. Yet I've still made it through 3.5 years as an aerospace engineer. Quiz bowl requires intelligence, sure, but a certain kind of intelligence. I know several brilliant people that are hopeless quiz bowl players either because their minds don't work that way or they don't really care about it.
This tournament will also give me a pretty accurate assessment of how well-rounded the knowledge of my classmates is. I expect the chemical and bio-medical and materials science engineers to clean up on most of the science, as there are lots of questions about organic chemistry, amino acids, and DNA and the like. Engineering physics people will likely do well on the subatomic particles side of the street, but there aren't so many of those. So it should mostly come down to who remembers their lit and their history from high school. There are a lot of points to be scored there that are really up for grabs. I have a lot of faith in them. At least in high school, a lot of them took AP English courses and AP history courses. Some of them must have retained something. The music questions will favor the band geeks, and heaven knows there are enough of them in engineering. The trash questions are something of a cipher, but I'm sure those will come out pretty well. Someone on each team will remember the movies and music and all of that stuff; I'm sure they haven't all had their heads in the sand.
March 11, 2003
Five days and counting
On March 7, my cable-based internet access went down. Naturally, this was the day before the tournament, so I couldn't send out any last-minute stuff, nor could I receive any of the like. This meant that I had to get up an hour earlier than I had planned, resulting in only 2.5 hours of sleep that night. For me, if I can get that 2.5 hours I can function again for the next twelve at a somewhat normal level, provided I receive sugar and caffeine infusions.
I wish I could say that the tournament ran smoothly, but I can't. For starters, five teams didn't show up, on top of two cancelling with 24 hours left to go. We quickly ran out of parking passes as well. Quick math: At an average tournament, we should be able to make about a 50% profit. Now, question sets from NAQT run at approximately $10/team, rooms are $35 each plus we have to rent an auditorium, taking that price to around $20 each. We have to do food for moderators, which goes to $2-$3 a team, trophies are also $2/team, we send out a mailing for $2-$3 per registration and then there are parking passes at $4 each. So with one parking pass per team, that comes to a cost of about $40 per team, which squares pretty well with our entry fee of $85 for the first team, $75 for each additional team.
However, when teams begin demanding additional parking passes this quickly gets thrown out of whack. We had one team where every player and coach drove their own car. They wanted seven parking passes. Quick math shows this adds up to a cost for us of $64. Their entry fee was $70 with the discounts they qualified for, which would leave us with a net profit of $6, a financial disaster. Because we only bought 35 passes, it wasn't a hardship for us, but it was hard on the parents and coaches of teams that showed up late and had to drive over to a parking structure and pay for the day. All told, each team ended costing us $45 each, off of an average entry fee of $68 and we didn't even get money from virtually of the teams that didn't show up. This leads to a few announcements for the 2003 Autumn Classic:
1. One parking pass will be distributed to each team as part of the entry fee (which in itself will be raised by $5 due to increased prices from Parking Services).
2. Additional parking permits will be available for purchase, but your intent will need to be brought to our attention by the Wednesday before the tournament.
3. Teams that drop within 48 hours of the tournament's start time will be put on our "watch list" and be required to pre-pay for the next tournament of ours that they choose to attend. After showing up for that tournament, they will be returned to pristine credit.
4. We're going to require confirmation on the billing e-mail that gets sent to the teams. I've had too many people whine that their junk mail filters killed my messages (OK, I've only heard it from one person, but still . . .). If they fail to respond, their team won't be guaranteed a spot in the field. We'll include a promise to send out this e-mail within three business days of receiving their registration.
Number 3 won't really fix the financial situation, as we've signed a contract for the rooms with LS&A Scheduling and ordered the questions, but it at least allows us to retool the brackets in a timely manner. This allows us to put on a good show for the teams that do bother to come around. We also have to make sure to include this all on our mass mailing in the fall.
Big thanks are due to my brother for putting up with me this weekend and for helping out at the tournament. As it was, we barely had enough staff to get through while having only a very few scorekeepers available. If all the teams had shown up, we really would have been thin on the ground. I blame myself for not having stressed staffing earlier, but I thought we'd at least be able to get 18 staff members from the 22 people we're flying around the country plus all of the alumni that we won't be paying for and I figured we'd pick up several from semi-regulars who aren't going to a nationals tournament this year. Our lowest turnout was from our DII players, only half of whom bothered to show up.
March 6, 2003
I'm rather busy
Today I had two assignents due and an exam to take. When it rains, it pours so I also have to get ready for Saturday's high school quiz bowl tournament I'm running. Today I stuck 31 teams into four divisions, wrote up a schedule for round robin play, determined a playoff format, sent out missives begging for staff and informing the teams of place/time for the tournament. Tomorrow I have to pick up the parking passes, copy the schedule, make some signs, drive to Albion and back, order the food and not lose my mind.
I was able to claw out a few minutes for myself in all this madness, so I got to see a good deal of the women's basketball game. They were playing in the opening round of the Big Ten tournament. Having finished last in the conference and facing 5th seeded Illinois, it looked like they were toast. They'd been sliding hard as of late, losing a lot of games big after letting their opponents get on early runs of 20 or more points. After predicting dire results, they of course went on to spite me and trounce the Illini by nearly 25 points. My only complaint is with the Fox Sports camera crew. Would it have killed them to show the band a few more times than the single time they actually did point the camera at them? I saw a few faces I recognized, but I wish I could have seen them a few more times.
March 1, 2003
Thank Goodness It's Over
Wow, that hockey game sucked. It sucked in every way, shape and form. It was a soul-sucking horror away from which I couldn't tear myself. It ended at 4-0, with MSU victorious, but that isn't the whole story. Three Michigan goals were called back; one call was that the net was off its moorings before the puck was in, two called the puck dead before it slid in. The first two of those MSU goals really shouldn't have happened. Goal number one happened when we failed to clear the zone, then a defender's stick got under a shot, deflecting it high and just under the crossbar, fooling Montoya. The second goal happened because the refs wouldn't give us the same courtesy as they extended to the Spartans. Montoya covered up, but the whistle wasn't blown and the puck trickled out, where a Spartan flipped it right into the wide-open net. But mostly the Wolverines didn't play like they need to if they want to get anywhere in the post-season. The NCAA's prelims are being held at Yost, it would be a shame to miss them.
Q: Suppose you're in charge of scheduling a hockey game. It's a huge game with your arch-rivals, with big postseason implications. Do you schedule it during classes or during spring break? Apparently whatever authority made up this year's schedule decided that spring break was a great time for the game, and that the student season ticket holders didn't deserve a ticket to this one because it's during spring break. The result was the WORST CROWD EVER at Yost. They SUCKED. It was practically a neutral site game held in a church. No one seemed to realize that maize is the proper color to wear when facing MSU, I was the only one in my section to cheer with anything approaching volume, the only one to remember "ugly goalie", "phone", etc. traditional cheers, and I actually sang the fight song. It's a bad day when you're one of two people in your section chanting along to "Let's Go Blue" and the other person is your brother. The student section seemed to contain maybe 50 students overall.
