July 10, 2012

Yesterday I got up at about 5 a.m. and set to work on a short article that needed to be done, and then worked on a larger article that also needed to be done. At about 7, I went back to bed, not thinking I'd be able to go back to sleep. But I must have, since I got up at 8 surprisingly refreshed. Good thing, too, because I needed to be considering what I had to do the rest of the day.

I finished both the short and the long articles by 10:30, with time for a quick shower thrown in. Then I drove to Glenview, a northern suburb, where I needed to take photos of a lunch gathering of a real estate organization. The event was at a kind of place I rarely see: an upmarket golf club, complete with all the posh trappings.

I took pictures of four groups of people, talking to them about their business, then drove back in time to pick Lilly up from her summer school class. When I got home, I took Ann to no-extra-charge, supervised swimming at a nearby park district pool, and then went home to write most of my daily column about the economy, as well as my next weekly contribution for another publication, along with a phone interview thrown in. I almost finished both bits of writing by about 4, when I picked up Ann and left her at home with Lilly, since I had another event to go to, this one in the southwest suburbs. Traffic was awful.

Never mind the details, the main thing was the event included a 30-minute walking tour of UPS' Chicago Area Consolidated Hub, a 1.5 million-square-foot package sorting and distribution facility. I'd never seen the likes of that. I was going to stay for the dinner, but I had something else scheduled in the evening: a concert to attend, scheduled before I knew I going to be doing these other things on the same day.

So I drove back home -- traffic was much lighter by this time -- picked up Yuriko and drove to the northern suburbs. We got to Ravinia only a few minutes after the concert started, and stood for the whole thing. We didn't mind a bit, because we got to see Natalie Merchant.

We got home by 11:30, and I polished off the work I hadn't quite finished in the afternoon, despite exhaustion. I filed the bastards just after midnight and went to sleep without much trouble.

A remarkable day. But I'm glad I don't have too many like it.

Call of Duty: MW3, Grand Theft Auto & Best of All, Death Race

This evening I pulled up Google News and one of the Top Stories headlines was, "Mitt Romney's Dark Side: Presidential Hopeful Tried Cigarettes, Beer." For a moment I thought an Onion article had wormed its way into the standard Google feed. But no, it was from Reuters.

Early this afternoon, as I pulled up to a red light at a major intersection, I noticed a fellow on a unicycle cross the street on the other side of the intersection. Riding casually across, one-wheeling his way to his destination. That's the first time I've ever seen anyone on a unicycle here in the suburbs, unless you count the performers at the circus a few years ago, which was technically in the suburbs.

Come to think of it, I can't remember seeing too many non-circus unicyclists on the streets of Chicago or Nashville or San Antonio, either. But I did see kids on unicycles sometimes in Osaka, and heard that some schools teach it in PE class.

At the grocery store today, I bought a popular soft drink whose commercial tie-in at the moment is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The clerk, a young man in his 20s, asked me if I'd played it. I said no, not interested. He told me that the soft drink packaging includes (I think) some kind of code that gives players extra ammo (or maybe a kit containing one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; and three pair of nylon stockings).

Apparently the game was released last weekend, and for some this event was a big hairy deal. I know this because Lilly told me about it. The release caused a lot of chatter at her school, especially among the boys she knows. I asked her if she had any interest in playing herself and she said maybe, but among that kind of game she likes to play -- at other people's homes -- Grand Theft Auto. You learn all kinds of things about your kids if you pay attention.

By golly, I think I'm supposed to fret that such a violent game will affect my daughter in evil ways. You know, just like the urges people my age felt to run down pedestrians because of the primitive arcade game Death Race. Ah, the screeching wheels, the screams of your victims. Doesn't that take you back? No? Wiki asserts that "because of its limited production run and the number of units that were destroyed, Death Race is very rare today. Collectors will sometimes pay $2,000 for a working unit in good condition." If it doesn't have one, the Smithsonian needs to get one.

In the late '70s, Mike, a guy I knew in high school, and I would sometimes visit the airport in San Antonio and play games at its arcade room, which was usually empty in the evenings. Death Race was one of the games there, and we played it. It was probably all we could do not to commit vehicular homicide on the way home.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin

More snow last night. But only about an inch, so the main effect was covering up the bumps and irregular mounds created by the intense shoveling and snowblowing of the last few days. Weather chronologists say that this has been the snowiest February on record in the Chicago area -- which was already the case by February 2.

So we turn to indoor activities. Lately we've acquired Just Dance 2, a Wii game. Usually I'm off doing something else when the girls or the girls and their friends are playing with it, but I can hear songs from its eclectic selection of dance tunes. The other day I was in the kitchen when I heard:

Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Lover the of the Russian queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on

What? A disco song about Rasputin? One that manages to rhyme "Rasputin" with "queen" and "machine"?

Sure enough, the Euro-disco group Boney M -- the creation of a German producer -- released just such a song in 1978. If I heard it then, I don't remember, and I think I would have remembered a song about Rasputin, whatever the genre. With certain exceptions, Euro-disco did not play much on American airwaves at the time, and I wouldn't have sought it out in those pre-Internet days. The only song of Boney M's I vaguely think I heard back then was "Rivers of Babylon."

The video for "Rasputin" is all kinds of funny, often unintentionally. Sorry to say, however, that the male member of the group, Bobby Farrell -- wearing the faux beard in the video, which must have made the lip-synching easier, and dancing up a storm -- was in the news recently for dying. On December 29 (N.S.) in St. Petersburg, same day and city as Rasputin.

Naturally, the mad monk's famed death is mentioned by the song too.

Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Lover the of the Russian queen
They put some poison into his wine
Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
He drank it all and said, "I feel fine"

More than anyone would need to know about "Rasputin" is
here.

Slumlord of the Gameboard

I'm not sure how many people actually do "family game night." We don't with any regularity, but we happened to this evening. Ann has more-or-less learned the basics of Monopoly (I remember doing the same in first grade), and was eager for all of us to play. So we did for about two hours.

Our set is a little frayed. The fold of the board is worn, some of the money is crumpled, and the barrel of the canon piece is bent. But it's all serviceable. Most of the money seems to be there, and more importantly, so are all of the deed cards.

In the end, I had the most properties and money. Yuriko and Lilly had left the game, and while Ann controlled a fair number of properties, she was cash poor. It might not be widely appreciated, but low-rent monopolies like Mediterranean and Baltic avenues can be cash cows if set up early enough, as I was lucky enough to do. I ended up being the slumlord, in other words, though toward the end I was Trump too, with Boardwalk and Park Place. Yuriko had the light-blue properties, and even some houses on them, but started development too late, as did Lilly with the green monopoly and Ann with the orange.

I spent some idle moments dreaming up round-the-board games for our time, since Monopoly is so Depression-flavored. Foreclosure would be one. Not sure how that would be structured, but it would involve the bank misplacing important loan-modification documents. Then there's Rescission, the exciting new game that rewards players who drive policyholders into penury. Or what about Cartel, the game of collusion and price-fixing?

Coming Soon to a Toy Store Near You

Rain and more rain over the weekend, creating enormous puddles in places and encouraging the tips of crocuses to emerge from muddy stretches.

During one downpour, I found myself in a big box toy retailer, and discovered some brand hybrids I hadn't heard of before. Somehow, for instance, I missed Hello Kitty Barbie, even though she's been around a while. Maybe she'll be remembered as an artifact of the 2000s bubble economy. With any luck.

Then there's Operation SpongeBob SquarePants Skill Game. I never did play much Operation when I was a lad, so the sight of this version didn't inspire strong feelings one way or another. But it and that odd Barbie did get me thinking about other brand hybrids not on the market yet. Such as:

Jimmy Hoffa Clue.

Polly Pocket Pompeii Playset.

Barbie Titanic. Maybe that would have been more timely back when the movie was released, but in any case accessories would include flotsam and a frozen Ken.

LEGO Genghis Khan, or maybe LEGO Golden Horde. There's this, but I'm thinking more of pyramids of skulls made of Legos.

Hanna Montana Lizzie Borden Playset. Watch out, Billy Ray Cyrus.

Biscuits & Gravy at Toomey's

Yesterday evening, after spending much of the day with a friend of hers, Lilly came home and asked if we could play Monopoly. At her friend's house, she said, she'd played "Chicago Monopoly."

"What's that?" I asked. "You have to get your alderman's approval to buy a house or hotel?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

It look me a moment to realize she meant the Chicago variety of the game, the one that features Chicago place names, rather than Atlantic City's. I might have mentioned this before, but I'm a purist in matters of Monopoly -- you have to be a purist in something -- and consider all variations bogus, mere exercises in expanding market share, except for the Waddingtons UK version, which was created not long after the US version.

I might feel differently if the variations I've seen made any socioeconomic sense. Highly expensive real estate always substitutes for Boardwalk and Park Place, but poor or scary neighborhoods never take the place of Mediterranean and Baltic avenues, for instance. No doubt Hasbro figures that would be inviting angry reactions.

Anyway, as we played, I looked through my wad of receipts from the trip and came to the conclusion that we spent $357.29 on gas over the ten days, though that only counts gas purchased away from home. Since the tank didn't come back quite as high as it was when we left, I'll add about $30 for the actual gas expense and then round it up: $390. I'd estimated a 2,000-mile trip would take $400 in gas money, so I was pretty close.

I didn't write down per gallon costs at each purchase location, and it turns out that not every receipt states the price that way, though many do. Generally speaking, though, the further south and east we went, the lower the price got. In Indianapolis, we paid $4.16; in East Tennessee, $3.90; Nashville and Frankfort, Ky., were somewhere between those.

Most of the gas stations were only fuel acquisition points, units of corporate multi-facility owners and operators with mostly familiar brands, out to sell high-margin food and other items besides gasoline. Then there was Toomey's Country Market, not far from Crosby, Tenn., which also sold gas and grocery items, but had a little restaurant in back.

On July 3, we constituted a lot of the breakfast rush. Besides us, there was a table of three -- a man, his daughter, and her son, probably -- and a man by himself. The waitress was also the cook, the only person attending to breakfast, so it took a little while to get our order. It was a good find on the whole, especially the biscuits and gravy. A backroad restaurant in the South that can't do biscuits and gravy might as well close up.

Lilly and Chess

Lilly’s at-home education continued apace over the weekend. That’s not the same as home schooling, which purports to take the place of institutional schooling. At-home education isn’t really education in any pedagogic sense, it’s just the stuff you pick up along the way, at home.

She’s taken a sudden interest in learning chess as it’s actually played, rather than the preschooler approach, which is to move the pieces around and take pieces at random. So whenever Ann was sleeping—Ann has a pre-preschooler approach that wrecks the board—Lilly would come to me and want to play. Play we did, about a half-dozen games in two days. I showed her the Fool’s Mate. I let her checkmate me that way, once. But in the other games, I showed her how to play by winning. “Someday,” I said, “you’ll be able to beat me.”

And she will. I was a decent player as a youngster, but never got to be really good—I never quite overcame a tendency to make occasional foolish mistakes, no matter how carefully I studied the board. That’s still a problem.

My brother Jay taught me how to play, maybe when I was about the same age as Lilly. In the fifth and sixth grade, I’d go with Tom T. to the high school chess club and play there, occasionally even winning. We must have been inspired by the victories of Bobby Fischer. Tom and I and a fellow named Paul organized a chess tournament in the sixth grade, held one Saturday in covered patio sort of space that the school had. If I remember right, we structured it as best two out of three games goes to the next level—and somehow came out with three finalists, one of whom was me. We never bothered with playing a championship game or games, though.

I didn’t play much in high school, but had some good opponents in college—Steve P especially (a co-host of the party I wrote about yesterday), who could use his bishops like knife blades between the ribs, and his teams of knights to hook into his opponents. Later, in Japan, I played a Scotsman whose talent for game was roughly equal to mine, so our games tended to devolve into trench warfare. Somehow, metaphors of violence come with this game, at least in my conception of it.

I’m not under the illusion that skill in chess and high intelligence necessarily go together—look at what a disagreeable crank Bobby Fischer turned out to be. Still, it’s a good thing for Lilly to be familiar with.

Puzzles

Sure enough (see my prediction on May 6), cold air blew through northern Illinois along with thunder and rain in the morning. Pleasant to lie in bed, half asleep, half awake, and listen to the rain on the roof and mid-distant thunder just as dawn breaks. The rest of the day was cloudy and distinctly cool—maybe 30 degrees off the previous day. Spring in the North is a series of ever-weaker blasts of cold air.

Spent some time the other day doing multiple-choice puzzles, for reasons that I will elaborate on some other time. By puzzles, I mean figuring out patterns in sequences of numbers and letters.

Some were easy: 5, 10, 6, 9, 7… next? Some took a few moments: 60, 30, 20, 15, 12… next? And one I puzzled about for about 20 minutes before I figured it out: 23 to is 3,983 as 32 is to (a) 3,839 (b) 3,994 (c) 4,874 or (d) 9,599. I tried all sorts of things on that one, till the answer popped into my head. At least the puzzles weren’t timed, since I needed time to think about some of them. Which makes me wonder about time limits on standardized tests. I've long wondered about them. A few problems in life require immediate attention, but number puzzles aren’t one of them.