Enoch’s Thoughts

I have a “habit” (I think addiction is too strong a word, but just barely), and one of my progeny recently asked some questions about it. Like a typical monomaniac, I gave her a longer answer than she was probably looking for. It dawned on me that other readers might be also interested in the topic, so I asked permission to turn our e-mail exchange into a posting. Here are her questions.

Questions

Do you consider there to be levels of cheating? Or is everything that doesn’t come out of your own brain cheating? I think that asking someone to verify spelling is better than searching the Internet, and that the Internet is better than checking the answer key. I think there’s a line between checking facts and peeking “behind the curtain,” as is were. I was just curious what you thought.

Oh, and bonus question: is it better to “cheat” or to leave a puzzle unfinished?

The topic, in case you haven’t figure out, is the humble Crossword Puzzle.

Answers

So here is how I answered:

Ultimately the goal is to enjoy yourself, which includes a measure of success (e.g., finishing, perhaps within a certain time, maintaining a “streak”, or just figuring out the twist) and a measure of satisfaction (e.g., not “cheating.”)

You have to set your own rules, but I’ll give you what my “rules” are currently. They have changed as I have gotten more experienced, and keep in mind I’ve been doing crosswords since before you were born, giving me a distinct advantage in the more historical questions 🙂

These comments are based on the NYT crossword, which has a pretty strict structure. As you probably know (and you should read the NYT puzzle guidelines if you don’t, a link for which I’ve included below), they increase in difficulty from Monday to Saturday. Sunday is bigger, with a difficulty level comparable to Thursday.

For me, the goal for the Sunday-through-Thursday puzzles is to finish in a certain length of time (it varies with the day, obviously) without looking anything up. I don’t always meet that goal, but I can hit it often enough that it remains a legitimate goal. For the Friday puzzle, I try to make a pass or two without looking anything up, then (or if I’ve been working more than an hour) I’ll look up one or two facts to either verify my guesses or help me get me started in an empty quadrant. On Saturday, I might make one pass, but I pretty quickly start looking things up.

The NYT iPad app keeps track of all kinds of statistics, including one’s finishing rank on each day, and whether you complete a puzzle within the initial 24 hours (during which the answers aren’t officially available.) It also keeps track of streaks, which I do check, but am not a slave to them, since the rest of my life usually suffers if I place too much importance on solving puzzles.

Here are a few more thoughts:

• When I do look something up on the internet, I usually try to learn something about the topic just to broaden my education.
• Looking at any of the crossword solution sites feels like cheating to me, but that is just another of my arbitrary rules.
• The reality is, the Fri and Sat puzzles are usually constructed in a way that looking facts up doesn’t really help that much. The long answers are usually multiple words, often with a pun involved (indicated by a “?” in the hint). So there’s not really anything you can look up.

Keep in mind that my “rules” reflect my experience and (not inconsiderable) longevity. I know plenty of neophytes who can barely finish a Monday puzzle when they start, but who quickly make good progress with just a few weeks of experience.

So I recommend you mostly just enjoy the challenge at whatever level and rules you decide on, and don’t be afraid to break them if you get frustrated.

By the way, on the NYT, after the puzzle has been out for 24 hours (and is not therefore eligible for a streak), you can unlock it, and it will tell you which letters are wrong (but not what the correct letter is unless you ask.) I do that on older Fridays and Saturdays pretty often.

I think, in answer to your final question, the satisfaction of finishing outweighs any negative feelings of looking things up, for the NYT or any puzzle.

Whew! Now that I’ve taken a breath, and re-read your original questions, I have a couple more actual answers.

I do think there are levels of “assistance”, some of which you may choose to define as “cheating.”

I agree with your hierarchy, and your “curtain” differentiation.

And though some of my NYT comments still apply to non-NYT puzzles, they will make more sense if you decide to join the ranks….

But I will say that I have gotten many years of satisfaction from just the Gwinnett Sunday puzzle (by Calvin R. and Jackie Matthews) and the Jonesin’ puzzle by Mike Jones, found in Atlanta’s Creative Loafing weekly.

Lastly. You forgot to mention whether you use a pen 😉

Addenda

Here’s a fun link to The New York Times Crossword Puzzle From Hell, a humorous take on the NYT puzzle by anthropologist and generally amusing writer Karl Petruso.

And here’s a link to a useful article if you want to take your puzzle game up to the next level. How to Solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. Will Shortz answers my progeny’s question in the last paragraph, and he mostly agrees with me. Lucky for him.

Like many people, we’ve often rented or borrowed multi-room dwellings for many of our vacations. I guess it all started with our honeymoon in a cabin at Hard Labor Creek State Park. I remember an early tripp to Fripp with my sister and her husband, and later visits to Hilton Head, including several time-share weeks graciously donated by the same sister & husband. We’ve spent more than one anniversary week at an isolated cabin in the woods of The Last Resort. During our more-children/less-money phase, we were privileged to stay at a family site on Smith Lake in North Central Alabama, and had some great times at a rustic church lodge near Black Mountain, NC.

As our children became adults with Real Jobs, we looked for opportunities that would still be meaningful while leveraging their limited vacation and holiday time, finally settling on spending Thanksgiving week on Edisto Island on the South Carolina coast. We stayed at several beach-front rental houses there until we found the perfect large-family-house on the marsh, to which we have faithfully returned over the past several years.

My birthday sailing lessons in 2005 started a growing affection for Lake Sidney Lanier, so we added a Memorial Day water stay, trying several VRBO properties at various places around the lake, learning some of the pros and cons of lake real estate.

All of these excursions featured great fun and food, and most included friends and family fellowship (The Last Resort excluded, for what are hopefully obvious reasons.) They also included some form of non-automotive transportation, ranging from bicycling on Fripp Island to canoe trips, hiking on mountain trails, sailing, skiing at Smith, and, most recently, kayaks and ski-dos. We have been fortunate to build some great memories, with only a few stitches, the occasional cast, and an extra pound or two to show for it.

Now, to get to the point of this posting, there’s a common, but easily overlooked thread running through these trips that I want to touch on. In almost every case, I have greatly enjoyed acquiring, or in some cases even generating, maps and charts of our locale and surroundings. It’s no secret that I am a fan of the visual representation of information, and a good map is a unique pleasure for me.

Now I am starting to look at maps with a slightly different perspective: these will be “closer to home”, shall we say, and they will be relevant more than one or two weeks a year.

Sounds like fun to me!

This is an extremely pleasant Saturday afternoon. A cloud cover and brief rain have kept the house and yard pleasantly cool compared to the last few unnaturally hot days. I have a project to work on involving cables and sound equipment. I have food and drink at hand, and music in the background. Other than missing my spouse (who is off visiting one of our distant young’uns), I could hardly ask for better. And it is quite timely, too.

My little world has been all a-twirl for the last few weeks. We have been seriously pursuing a new housing opportunity that has occupied a large share of my life, thoughts, and emotions, much larger than housing usually does.

This pursuit has come about due the intersection of multiple factors, including

• real estate opportunities resulting from the recent economic unpleasantness,
• realizing (much to our surprise) that we aren’t getting any younger,
• recognition of our growing affection for water, including ocean, lake, marsh, river, and boats of all kinds, and
• the pleasant opportunity to share enjoyable surroundings with our family members more than just once or twice a year.

All of this has not come without its own share of fretting. It would be literally impossible for me to convey all of the ponderations I have been pondering. It has been downright ponderous.

Rather than even attempt to summarize, allow me to just list some of the key words, in no particular order, just to give you an idea of what has been waking me up at night of late. Words like investment, fun, stagnation, opportunity, conserving, spending, work, conservation, change, risk, future, age, life-phase, energy, fortunate, resources, fortune, parents, children, goals, inspiration, and happiness.

By my own observation, us humans are particularly good at arranging the facts to justify what we want to do. I try to be conscious of this tendency, and remain objective, but, really, how can you know?

Nonetheless, in all my thinking, I have reached some intermediate conclusions that I feel like sharing. Realizing that I am not you, and you are not me (unless it is me that is reading this), you should take them with a handful of salt, and perhaps take another look at the cartoon in my previous post.

1. At some point in life, I think it is OK to ask yourself what you are saving for. (Or, if you are a stickler for grammar, “… for what are you saving.”
2. For me, the appropriate use of my resources has always been a balancing act, weighing the needs and desires of myself and my family against inclinations toward sharing, altruism, and helping the less-fortunate.
3. There are fears that plague us in our darkest moments – death, medical disability, painful loss, weather disaster, political upheaval, economic collapse, uncertainty about the future. Yet it is liberating to realize that these dire potentials can also provide a powerful justification for seizing the day, for enjoying every moment, for loving deeply, and, yes, sometimes even spending madly.

That’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to say as the future unfolds.

In math (does it show my age that I don’t say “maths”?) and science, a baseline is a reference, a metric against which other measurements may be compared, a sort of “normal” state.

In an initial writing I postulated a baseline, namely, that I have a Peculiar Perspective. Today I found a cartoon that adds another baseline view. Click for larger view. Consider yourself warned.

The May 4 broadcast of Fresh Air featured an interview with James Levine, recently-retired orchestra conductor for the New York Metropolitan Opera. His approach to conducting in rehearsal versus conducting during actual performance seemed very logical, yet novel.

But the part of the interview that really caught my ear was when Terry Gross asked him about his conducting debut at The Met in 1971, at the age of 27. (His debut conducting the Cincinnati Symphony occurred 17 years prior, at age 10!) As part of his response, he noted that musicians tend to focus on musical skill and ability rather than age.

Revelation, circa mid-70s

I have made it clear in conversation and in writing that I am not a skilled musician, just a persistent one. I dearly love rehearsing, performing, and just “pickin'” with other people, but I am awful at “woodshedding,” the term applied to the intense solo practice required to improve one’s skills. As a result, it is more accurate to say that I know how ‘operate’ my instruments, instead of knowing how to ‘play’ them.

And yet, I have had some wonderful opportunities to perform with musicians of all ages during all stages of my life. I started out singing with my older parents and my younger sisters around the piano in the living room. When I was a teen, I sang in choirs with some old timers whose voices ranged from the gravelly to the mellow, and began to learn guitar picking from my older cousin (OK, he was just a year older, but that seems like a lot when you are 14.)

I’ve performed with a 100-year-old banjo player, and sat in once with a country band of high-schoolers who called themselves “Fenced In.” I played handbells for years in a choir that ranged from teenagers to retirement home denizens. I won’t include my own talented children in this list, since they sort of have to let me pick with them, except to say that one summer Bo did invite me to accompany him in several very pleasant outdoor performances hosted by a Decatur wine and cheese bar.

Through all of these experiences I can’t ever remember feeling like I was being judged by other musicians because of my age. Insufficient skill, weak chops, lack of practice, bad puns, and even lack of shoes on occasion, but not age. My personal musical experiences have confirmed James Levine’s assessment.

OK, maybe there’s one exception. Not too many years ago, my wife helped assemble a band of college-aged musicians for a series of Sunday night contemporary church services, and, almost accidentally, pulled together some of the coolest musicians I’ve ever played with, run sound for, and schlepped equipment with. These guys seemed larger than life, and they went on from that church event to play together as a band for a year or so, write some cool songs, and record a couple of CDs. Though they have each gone their separate ways in music and in life, they are still good friends, and I still cherish, and proudly answer to, the nickname they gave me during their nicknaming phase. During that phase, for example, they called my son who picked with them “Tall,” they called his younger sister “Tallette,” and they called my wife “Hot Mama.”

So what did they call me?

“OLD.”

There is a fascinating and disturbing 10-minute TED talk by Eli Pariser, in which he explains how your favorite internet sources (Facebook, Google, etc.) are controlling the content you see, without your knowledge or permission. This is not a conspiracy theory, but is based on changes Eli has recently observed in his own internet results. He explains how and why this is happening, and why is it not a good thing.

In the middle of the talk, I was reminded of Lawrence Lessig’s 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which describes ways in which software implementations can subtly (and not-so-subtly) promote a particular agenda or position.

Pariser’s TED talk is at on.ted.com/Pariser.

We are hosting a family of two cats, two dogs, and two humans this week. The cats actually arrived last Thursday, three days before the rest of the bunch. Their behavior surprised me, even though I know cats pretty well. For the first three days, they had a quiet house completely to themselves, and yet they were very shy and skittish, almost totally unapproachable.

But when the rest of the family, including the two very active dogs, showed up, the cats underwent an almost immediate transformation, from shy to confident. They no longer ran from our touch, but would readily let us pet them. They roamed into places they had previously avoided.

For some reason, the presence of their “mommy and daddy,” and their canine “sisters” made them feel more secure than they felt in a quiet home they had all to themselves.

Many of our reactions to modern life seem just as strange to me as the cats’ behavior. Here are a couple of anecdotes for your consideration:

• I know someone who carefully blacks out her name and address before throwing out junk mail. When I pointed out that her name and address are readily available public information, she said, “But that doesn’t mean I have to make it easy for them, putting it right there in front of them. Besides, it makes me feel safer.” I’m not sure who “them” is, why they would have access to her trash, or what they could do with her name and address.
• I also know someone who refuses to wear seat belts. She fears being trapped in a burning car more than she fears being violently projected through the front windshield, even though the odds of the latter are much greater than the former.
• I know someone who refuses to transact any business via the internet, for fear someone will be able to get all her money somehow. As it turns out, several recents breeches of “secure” corporate databases have made that fear considerably more understandable, perhaps even justified.
• I know several people with burglar alarms who have decided that the embarrassment of disturbing the neighbors with a false alarm outweighs the benefits of activating the alarm, so they just never turn it on. And it is not unreasonable to assume that the alarm company sign in the yard has as much actual security effect as the alarm system itself.

Bruce Schneier is a nationally recognized cryptographer, computer security specialist, writer and expert on the topic of security. He gave a TED talk last year that was recently posted by the TED folks. His talk explains much of what I observe about our reactions to threats, danger and security. He also has something in common with Chuck Norris.

Here are some points Bruce discussed in his talk.

The term “security” can really refer to two different things, the feeling, and the reality. It is possible to feel secure without actually being secure, and it is possible to be secure without feeling secure. Of course, what we all want is to both feel and actually be secure.

Security is almost always a tradeoff. You trade such things as money, convenience, capabilities, fundamental liberties, for an increase in security.

And the question then becomes not whether our security efforts make us safer (they almost all have some positive effect), but whether they are worth the tradeoff.

There are rarely any clearly defined right or wrong answers, either. “Should I get a burglar alarm?” Well, it depends. What is your house like? What is your neighborhood like? How valuable are your belongings? How much risk of theft are you willing to accept? Will you even remember to activate it?

In general people have a natural intuition for security decisions. The tradoffs around double-locking the door of your hotel room, or buckling your seat belt, are very reasonable to most people.

Security decisions can also be viewed from an evolutionary perspective. The rabbit in the field hears a noise, and must make a decision: do I keep eating, or should I flee? Make the wrong decision, and you either starve, or you get eaten.

From that we might conclude that humans are good at making correct security decisions. Unfortunately, we are not. And why not? The short answer is that we opt for the feeling of security rather than the reality.

Throughout most of human history, the perception and the reality of safety have been closely aligned. But one could argue that our reactions are still tuned for living in the East African highlands around 100,000 BC. Those instincts may not be so helpful in contemporary New York City.

We have some key biases that color our perceptions:

1. We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks, and downplay common risks. That’s why flying still seems more dangerous than driving, despite the statistics.
2. The unknown seems riskier than the familiar. That’s why we tend to fear that our child will be kidnapped by a stranger, when it is very much more likely that a kidnapper will be a relative.
3. Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks. That’s why we used to fear Osama Bin Laden more than terrorists in general.
4. People underestimate risks in situations they do control, overestimate risks in situations they don’t control. If you take up skydiving or smoking, you tend to downplay the risks, compared to a danger that seems outside your control, such as terrorism.

Other cognitive biases also affect our perception of security.

• One is “availability” – we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring something to mind. If we hear a lot about tiger attacks, but not much about lion attacks, we tend to rightfully fear the tiger. And this worked fine until the invention of the newspaper industry. Newspapers tend to publicize rare risks out of proportion to reality. Bruce tells people, “If its in the news, don’t worry about it.” By definition, things that appear in the news are rare! Common and likely occurrences, such as car crashes or domestic violence, just don’t make the news.
• Our cultural identity as story tellers produces another bias. [This is one of my favorite hot buttons.] We tend to react to, and remember, stories much more strongly than we do to to data and statistics.
• Another cognitive bias that affects our perception of security is basic innumeracy – we are pretty good at visualizing small numbers and small odds, but not at all good with very large (a trillion dollars) or very small (one chance in a million.)

All of these cognitive biases act as filters to our perception, and the result is that we often feel more or less secure than we actually are.

Schneier goes on in the talk to discuss “security theatre,” the difficulty of evaluating protection schemes for events that don’t happen very often, or for changes that span decades. He explains why and how mental models help us understand complex situations, and where those models tend to come from. He discusses the various agendas pursued by different security stakeholders, and how confirmation bias makes it very difficult for us to change our models.

Finally, he talks about our reliance on others for safety, for example, in pharmaceuticals, air safety, and building codes, and he describes his ultimate goal, which is to provide people with better security models so they can make better choices.

I think I’ll stop without trying to hammer conclusions into your head. I may revisit the topic later – you might want to find a hard hat.

Meanwhile, if you want to check out Bruce Schneier for yourself, here are some links:

• The TED talk: http://blog.ted.com/2011/04/26/the-security-mirage-bruce-sc hneier-on-ted-com/
• Bruce’s Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.o rg/wiki/Bruce_Schneier
• Bruce’s security blog: http://www.schneier.com/ (includes a link to the twitter feed about the Osama Bin Laden action by a guy sitting in a coffee shop in Abbottabad while it happened.)
• And finally, the thing Bruce has in common with Chuck Norris – a series of “security facts” about Bruce: http://www.schneierfacts.com/ Most of them require some knowledge of security and cryptography to understand, but some of them are just plain funny.

Checking off boxes on a to-do list is fun no matter how long the list. I got to check off a couple recently. (Remember that you can click on the photos for a full-size version.)

A gate

There’s a small deck outside a bedroom, and a lady often wheels her man through a door into the fresh air and sunshine. But there is a short flight of stairs in a direct line with the door, and they both worry about the wheelchair accidentally rolling down the stairs. They asked me for a solution, and we discussed several gate options, but the stairs are wide and the deck narrow, so a conventional gate would be cumbersome. We talked about a folding gate, but that seemed complicated. We needed something that would be effective, easy to use, out of the way, and relatively easy to build.

After re-surveying the space, I came up with a design that I could build with four 1x4s, four 2x2s, and some miscellaneous hardware. I sketched it up (yes, on MyPad) then took a trip to Lowe’s for the parts, which cost less than $50, including a nice set of counter-sink bits for my collection.

It took a couple of hours to construct it, most of that time trying to get all of the pieces square working on top of a picnic table. The finished result works pretty well. The balusters (is that really what they are?) on the gate fit across the one at the top of the stair to hold the gate closed. The gate slides open and rests on four long lag screws covered with 1/2″ i.d. schedule 80 PVC, because it is grey instead of white. The lag screws also hold the fourth 1×4 in place to keep the gate from falling off the lag screws.

And, as you can see in the last picture, the design fulfilled one more requirement which was not part of the original specification, but which I added during the observation stage. Daisy is very pleased with it.

Stove

The second check-off was the plumbing and wiring of the new stove. After entirely too many weeks, I took a day off to run the gas line and electric connection, getting it all complete and tested just in time for a maiden stove voyage consisting of a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled pepperjack-on-rye sandwich.

I managed to knock together a temporary housing around the back of the stove while we plot the eventual cabinetry and storage which will replace all of the stuff I demolished, as previously described.

And in the middle of it all, it appears that Spring has arrived. We had delightful guests this weekend, two cats, three dogs (including Rainier, pictured) and six humans. It was great fun, and only occasionally raucous. Just the right amount.

I just returned from a work trip to the Left Coast. As part of my self-prescribed therapy, I’m posting a few thoughts, some brief, most not so.

Long: Back to the Future

I think of myself as relatively familiar with new technology, but my rental car experience brought me up short. I felt like I had been transported into the future, without warning.

First of all, the “key ring” they gave me didn’t have a key on it, just two identical clickers with the usual lock, unlock, and open-trunk symbols. Then, when I got to the car, there was no place to stick a clicker, just a pushbutton that said “start” and an LED display that said “brake.” Being the obedient type, I stepped on the brake and pressed the button. All of the dash indicators lit up as if the car were running. But there was absolutely no sound. And, in addition to the usual speedometer and battery charge indicators, there was a big meter labeled “KW.”

About that time, another display attached to the front of the dashboard started talking to me. “Select destination,” it said. This didn’t surprise me quite as much as it might have, since the rental representative had mentioned that the car had a GPS system in it that I was welcome to use, even though I had neither requested nor paid for it.

After the somewhat laborious task of entering the state, city, street and street number using a cursor and an Enter button, it seemed that I was finally ready to go. I placed the (thankfully, normal) transmission selector in “R”, and cautiously pressed on the accelerator. The car silently glided back out of the parking space, and I shifted to “D” just as the GPS system began to advise me to drive so that the triangle symbolizing my vehicle was lined up with the purple line symbolizing my calculated route.

About the time I hit 30 miles per hour, the gasoline engine started, and it began to sound like a “real” car. I am quite familiar with both notions, that of an auto GPS system, and that of a hybrid, at least in theory. And while I have actually ridden in an early Prius several years ago, and used a hand-held hiker’s GPS about the same time, this was my first experience with both technologies in their current instantiation, simultaneously, and in a new city to boot.

Over the next few days, the new technologies and I reached a level of mutual acceptance and understanding. I can see that both offer significant advantages, particularly once one becomes familiar with them. But I do have a few thoughts to share.

• I’m pretty amazed at the cavalier manner with which the rental car company put a Georgia boy in a hybrid without a shred of introduction, quick-start guide, or even the usual owner’s manual in the glove box. I know a lot of people who might still be sitting there trying to figure out how to get out of the car to ask for help, for fear that it might start off by itself, or perhaps blow up.
• The GPS system did get me to my destination, but I don’t think it was much easier than my usual map approach would have been. Through the few days I used it driving around, at least three times I had to, “as soon as possible, make a safe and legal U-turn,” because the instructions were not quite clear enough. That’s about my normal wrong-turn-per-day ration when using a map, although I suspect my map skills are better than average, and my GPS skills a little worse.
• One significant disadvantage of the GPS-only approach was that, when I arrived at my initial destination, I still had no idea where I was, relative to the airport. I was just following the instructions to “turn right in one-half mile. Prepare to turn right. Bong-bing.” I really have to stare at an appropriately-scaled map to really understand where I am. I suppose I am somehow bound to symbolic representations.
• Figuring out how to gas up a rental car on the way back to the airport is frequently a stress inducer, so the rental car agencies now offer you the opportunity to buy a whole tank of gas at a per-gallon price that is less than the street price. The third option is to do nothing, and they will happily charge you around double the street price to refill it for you. I figured out several trips ago that pre-purchasing the full tank makes dollars and sense most of the time. But on this trip, I learned that FOR A HYBRID, THIS IS NOT TRUE! I drove around for three days before the needle even moved from the Full position. In a way, I sorta feel like they sand-bagged me, because I elected the pre-purchased fuel option when I had no idea that I would be driving a hybrid.
• I never did figure out the KM dial (photo above). The pointer would dip into the blue when I braked, but would otherwise stay on zero. A couple of times it moved above zero for no apprent reason. I could not correlate its movement with anything I was doing, except not braking. Mysterious, and not particularly helpful to be taking up so much instrument panel real estate.

Shorter: Waste Land

Vik Muniz is probably Brazil’s most well-known visual/graphic artist. A common approach for him is to create an image with a material somehow relevant to the image, then take a high-resolution photograph of it. One example is a series of portraits he made of the children of sugar cane growers. The portraits were made from granulated sugar, each grain carefully placed. Another well-known work is Vik’s dual-rendition of the Mona Lisa, with the right version made of peanut butter and the left one of jelly.

Waste Land is an award-winning independent film that traces one of Vik’s large scale projects from inspiration through execution, including its effect on his subjects. The subjects are “pickers of recyclable materials” who work in the largest landfill in Brazil, outside Rio.

It is a fascinating work, with deeply personal stories both inspiring and heart-breaking, and scenes far-removed from our placid existence. Jayne watched it on MyPad as we traveled to and from Athens one evening, and observed that you certainly don’t look at garbage the same after you’ve seen Waste Land.

But ultimately I decided to watch Waste Land when I read that the distributors chose to offer it via iTunes as a means of saving packaging. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. (See below some previously unposted thoughts on my long-term relationship with garbage.)

It’s available to “rent” for $4 or to purchase for $10. Click for the Waste Land web site.

Very Short: French Phrases

Here’s a quick one purely for fun. It’s a web page that lists a large group of French phrases commonly used by English speakers. Clique ICI. And if you go to the home page, you find a wealth of other phrase treasures, including Latin phrases, American phrases, and a “phrase thesaurus” for writers. (If you don’t already know this, backspace the URL until you get to the root domain, which in this case is “uk”.)

Ooops. Not quite as short: Garbage

I wrote the following back in January of ’09:

My fascination with trash started early. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a garbageman. It seemed like such fun – they got to ride on the back of this huge mechanical contraption, holding on with one hand. They had big muscles. They even got to jump on and off the truck while it was moving! I totally ignored the unpleasant realities (that recurring garbage odor in your clothes, the heat of summer, getting your tongue stuck on the truck in winter….)

As time and trash passed, the notion of garbage would periodically surface in my consciousness. There was a garbage strike in NYC that caused unpleasantly fragrant chaos, and later a shorter one in Atlanta. Barges full of NY [garbage] floating aimlessly on the ocean looking for a harbor that would accept them. The notion of hazardous waste, and toxic trash. More barges from NY sailing 300 miles off-shore to dump their trash. USCG rules limiting what a boat may discharge into the ocean (Plastics: never).

I guess I never finished that posting. I think it was intended as an introduction to some crazy garbage pick-up chaos occurring about that time in my home county. It has taken over two years to resolve and implement the county’s original well-intended plan to provide an efficient and cost-effective system for collecting trash and recyclables. The resultion included a poorly-executed Request For Proposal that was ultimately thrown out by a local judge, a last-minute extension of “business as usual” of an indeterminate length that left several companies holding the bag, so to speak, and an awkward transition that left many of us with an extra 60-gallon garbage container we can’t throw away. (Have you ever tried to throw away a garbage can? Only way to do it is to put it in a bigger can.) I’m not really serious about wanting to throw it away, but I don’t really need it.

Now that they have finally finished the transition, our service is actually pretty good. It’s covered by an annual fee associated with county taxes, the number of garbage trucks rumbling through our neighborhoods has been reduced by at least 60%, and we can now recycle 35 different types of paper, metal, and plastic materials, no separation required.

I guess the conclusion is that my life-long concerns about garbage, and my positive feelings about sustainability and recycling, have been somewhat justified.

Could there possibly be a better place to terminate a posting than having the most peculiar pontificator almost be right about something?

I think not.

Most of my postings come together pretty quickly. Sometimes I think about them for a while, but once I start typing, the words usually flow pretty easily. This one has taken weeks. Oh, I’m sure part of it is emotional. But most of it is just the sheer volume of information I would have liked to include. Fortunately for you, dear reader, I think I have winnowed it down to a digestible size. We’ll see.

All of my progeny are creative and clever, and each has unique gifts for design, but one of them actually has a diploma that reads “engineer,” so I have no hesitation in using the term “engineered” to describe her wedding. She used a CAD program to design some of the decorations, and showed up at the site with a stack of drawings depicting the key wedding details.

Like any good design, this wedding had some key foundational elements (in addition to the customary fiancee, which, although apparently not required, lends an air of credibility to the wedding planning process.) She wanted it to be outside, even though their schedule placed the wedding in that time of unpredictable weather when winter transitions to spring (Winterspring?) She wanted it to be in the mountains, preferably at a place that had the right feel. And she wanted it to stretch over several days, leaving plenty of time for visiting, participation, and celebration.

With these elements in hand, the couple then picked out a visual theme – birds on bare branches. Birds because he is an amateur ornithologist, and branches to represent faith in the coming of Spring. Or something like that, anyway. And they picked out a color scheme – an organic mixture of yellows, greens, and browns.

Finally, she announced the “emotional theme” (my term) – she wanted it to be “vintage, funky, and fun,” totally surprising no one who knows the couple.

Over the next few months, daughter and MOB visited locales, tried on dresses, tasted caterers’ wares, and planned the event details. They solicited help from family and friends, many of whom they had previously helped with their own weddings, and incorporated a myriad of suggestions into a guiding plan, much of which was captured in the aforementioned drawings.

When the wedding week finally arrived, it brought an unarguable meteorological prediction: like it or not, it was going to rain most of the wedding day. But she was able to adjust the plan while still retaining the most important key elements.

Instead of trying to narrate the whole wedding (there are terabytes of video and still images that can do that far better than I can), allow me to list a few features that stood out for me.

• The locale was the Stovall House, a mountain inn and restaurant built in 1837. Although the original plan was for the wedding to take place in the back yard overlooking the scenic mountain view, the wedding was moved to the front porch of the house to keep the gathered guests and participants from melting.
• The wedding celebration really started on Thursday morning, when close family and friends gathered in Athens to witness the groom’s dissertation presentation for his PhD-Chem, and didn’t finish up until bride and groom left the venue on Sunday afternoon headed north for a brief honeymoon near Gatlinburg. They were the last ones to leave. I think they just wanted to absorb every minute of the event.
• In a similar, prolonged fashion, the “reception” started before the actual wedding ceremony, and continued well after it was over. The food, drink, DJs and tables were in a huge tent erected behind the house. As the night wore on and the decorators began to undecorate, the action migrated into the house, where an impromptu pickin’ broke out, which included a mandolin solo by the groom.
• Anyone who showed up early was encouraged to cut out bird silhouettes, guided by the original CAD template. Tied with strings, hundreds of them decorated the tent and “wedding porch”, fluttering in the breeze.
• She decided to use old window frames hung by stout ropes to “define the space” on the front porch. (The bride and groom had spent a couple of hours removing the glass several weeks before.)
• Bride and groom wore Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, black for him, brown for her.
• The wedding program was a theme-decorated chalkboard, custom-routed by brother Ben, and hand-lettered on the wedding day by friend and soon-to-be sister-in-law Marilyn.
• In the middle of the ceremony, the officiant, Amy, led the bride and groom to “literally and figuratively tie the knot,” using two pieces of the same rope that was used to suspend the window frames.
• The wedding cake was Postel de Tres Leches featured by Taqueria Los Hermanos, a favorite Mexican restaurant of the entire clan.
• The groom’s “cake” consisted of Gummi Bears in a TARDIS candy jar, just one of many Doctor Who references in the wedding. The BBC programme, Doctor Who, is the longest-running science fiction show in television history, and the TARDIS is the Doctor’s primary mode of time travel. While it appears to be an ordinary British police call box, it is larger on the inside than the outside. (The name stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.) Other Doctor Who appearances at the wedding included a miniature TARDIS attached to the bridal bouquet, the use of a Sonic Screwdriver several times during the wedding, and a surprise gift to the groom of a portable wardrobe, shaped like a nearly-full-sized TARDIS. And the sound track for the couple’s “official” introduction at the reception was the Doctor Who theme song.
• The bridal bouquet included flowers hand-fashioned by the bride from pieces of her mother’s wedding dress.
• All of the floral arrangements and reception decor were assembled by friends and family from locally-procured vegetation and loaned glassware.
• Table decorations at the rehearsal dinner featured bird houses hand-made from driftwood by an artisan in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, the groom’s home.

None of this would have been possible without the energy and skills of the bride’s friends and family. She had access to an unbelievable supply of talented and willing workers. Even from my own limited experience with weddings, I know that all weddings benefit from that sort of help. When son Ben married Beth, Beth’s family miraculously created a winter wonderland in what had been an empty event space. But I got to watch this one first hand, and it was both fun and impressive.

To keep my promise of brevity, I’ll draw this narrative to a close by saying that it was a delight to officially make Franklin a part of our family, and to get to know his family over the the course of the wedding and the weeks of pre-wedding planning and parties.

So I am left with feelings of relief that it’s done, satisfaction that it turned out well, and optimism for the new couple.

And, yes, I have been wondering if there might be a market for an advanced degree in Wedding Engineering.