Baltimore Diary

A Little Grinchy

Rachel Phelps: [As "Wild Thing" starts to play and the crowd reacts] I hate this fucking song.

—Major League (1989)
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Now that Thanksgiving is over and we're moving into high gear on Christmas, of course it means that we're going to be hearing a lot of Christmas music.

What that means is that we'll hear about nineteen million permutations of about twenty different songs. The fact is, when you put on the "All Christmas All the Time" radio station (and there's at least one in every town; some of them started with that format weeks ago), the song catalogue just isn't that deep.

Many years ago, there was an AM station in New York City, WNEW-AM. They stood at 1130 on your dial and their format was old standards. It wasn't the "Music of Your Life", which was beamed by satellite to all the affiliates; they had DJs who programmed the shows and you got a lot of the Big Band sound, with Jazz vocalists and American standards, that sort of thing. (In fact, WNEW was the station that invented the DJ.) And every day at noon, the DJ, a fellow named William B. Williams, who had a show called "The Make-Believe Ballroom", would play the song Stardust.

Every day. Without repeating a recording unless he felt like it. For years.

This is what it's like listening to an All-Christmas station. The same few songs by all kinds of different artists. But there are a few songs that just plain irritate me:

• The Chipmunks Christmas song is one of the worst offenders. This song just makes my teeth hurt, and its popularity, which goes back to before I was born, is inexplicable. It's basically a one-joke novelty song, and the same joke gets repeated later on, in case you didn't catch the hilarity the first time around. We get it, Dave: Alvin doesn't pay attention. Give the little rodent some Ritalin and be done with it, already. The only bright note to all this is that nobody bothers to cover it because A) nobody is going to do the Chipmunk schtick, and B) there's really only one verse to the song without the schtick. Although that didn't stop Eurythmics from cutting "Sweet Dreams", did it?

   

• "My Favorite Things", the song from The Sound of Music, somehow turned into a Christmas song when this 1965 album by The Supremes came out (this is the CD cover, hence the "bonus tracks"). It's not a bad rendition of the song; in fact many of the tracks on this album are pretty good. But then again, all of the other songs on the album are Christmas songs. Not so much this one. And it might not be so bad if they stuck to the Supremes' rendition, but no. Other artists are starting to creep into the Christmas pantheon of "My Favorite Things." Just step away from the Rodgers & Hammerstein, please. And remember where you heard it first.

     

Damn right.

 









 

• Speaking of music that's been shoehorned into Christmas, someone's taken Pachelbel's Canon in D and added a children's choir with some Christmas lyrics to it. So you get the Canon plus the kids, then the Canon by itself, then the Canon and the kids again. None of which gets around the fact that it wasn't a Christmas song in the first place, so just cut it out. If you want to do something new, then do something new. If you want to re-do an existing Christmas song, nobody's stopping you. But don't do bogus mashups like this. Not on my watch, boy.

• Before you jump too ugly on me about "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer", let me start by saying that I rather like this song. What I object to is the specific recording that we hear over and over again. When the song first started to break, in 1982, it was on a 45-rpm record, on a label called "Oink". By 1984 it was a nationwide novelty hit and CBS signed Elmo & Patsy Shropshire (that's their last name; don't say you don't learn stuff here) to a contract, and they re-recorded the song that year. The 1982 recording, to my ear, was MUCH funnier, because it was done in such a deadpan style. They basically trusted you to get the joke. The 1984 CBS recording, which is what we are now "treated" to, is a much "wackier" recording, where Elmo will punch up certain lines (note the heavy emphasis on the "You can say" part of the chorus and the overpronunciation of "incriminating Claus marks"), which is the verbal equivalent of an elbow to the ribs. The hell of it is, I had a copy of the Oink 45 and I can't find it.
• 

  I'm sure everyone and his brother has seen this video, which is a set of about 16,000 Christmas lights synchronized to "Wizards of Winter" by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I don't actually have much problem with this one either, although I'll mention that I heard it today on the radio and it's not as cool a tune without seeing the synchronized lights at the same time. They really complement each other well. 

And here's where I borrow a page from Yellojkt's playbook and get into some Blatant Comment Whoring^TM: Agree? Disagree? Anything you'd like to see banished?

Cut Loose

Lightning McQueen: Doc, hold it! Seriously, your driving's incredible!
Doc Hudson: Wonderful. Now go away.
Lightning McQueen: Hey, I mean it. You've still got it!
Doc Hudson: I'm asking you to leave.
Lightning McQueen: Come on. I'm a racecar, you're... a much older racecar, but under the hood, you and I are the same.
Doc Hudson: We are not the same! Understand? Now, get out.

—Cars (2006)

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Sometime in the last month or so, the Morrell Park Community Association decided to cut me loose.

I'm not sure of the reason (or reasons) why, but I've got a couple of guesses which I won't share here.

For the last couple of years, I produced the Association's monthly newsletter and, for a slightly longer time period, I ran their website. Getting the material for the newsletter was problematic at best, and I often found myself sending emails begging for things like the President's monthly message. Then I'd be up until 2:00 AM the night before it was due, getting the whole deal laid out correctly and the pagination straightened out. I drew pretty heavily on my experience at the newspaper group in New Jersey right before I moved down here, and I think it showed. The newsletter had a clean look and contained a lot of good information. And, because I was also doing the website, everything dovetailed neatly. There were plenty of times I didn't have the space to do something in the newsletter and I could just refer people to the website.

Last month I got some of the information I needed; it came in dribs and drabs but I didn't get everything. I did the best I could and put a newsletter together. The next morning I delivered it to the Association's Vice-President. She told me that she didn't think I was going to do a newsletter because of GF's illness, so she'd asked someone else to do it.

Wow. Glad I stayed up late for THAT one. It really irritates me, because I have never been late for a newsletter, no matter what my personal circumstance. Even if I went incommunicado, I delivered--in fact, HAND-delivered--every issue on time. The single time it was late was because I'd gotten information late. So anyway, my newsletter was never published, and since I still hadn't received updated information, I couldn't update the website. So the website is still stuck in the past.

This month, I haven't heard anything from anyone. I've received nothing. I have to assume that they don't want me to do this for them anymore, which is fine with me. You have no idea how tired I am of chasing down stuff from everyone, correcting their dreadful spelling and grammar, formatting everything to match everything else, and doing the whole layout routine. Even with the shortcuts I'd built into the project it was a monthly pain in the ass.

The domain I'd purchased for the Association expires pretty soon, too. I haven't decided whether I'll renew it and park something else on the space, or what. But the Association hasn't paid me for the domain renewal, nor the past year's webhosting fees (I split with them because I store Baltimore Diary materials in a directory, along with the redirect page).

One less thing--two, actually--to worry about.

At the Hopper

Ferris: Cameron, what have you seen today?
Cameron: Nothing good.
Ferris: Nothing - wha - what do you mean nothing good? We've seen everything good. We've seen the whole city! We went to a museum, we saw priceless works of art! We ate pancreas!

--Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

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Yesterday I took the girls to Washington, DC, so we could go view some of the extremely historical stuff they have there. Those of you who have driven in DC know that parking is a huge headache, especially on days ending in "y". So unless I get very lucky and spot someone actually pulling out of a space, I usually head down to the Ronald Reagan Building and park in their garage for the flat $10 weekend fee and be done with it. This is a decent, centrally-located place, steps away from the Washington Monument.

The bad news (for the girls) was that our ultimate destination was the National Gallery of Art, which is 'way back up the Mall toward the Capitol Building. NGA is actually two buildings, designated "West" and "East", with a street between them (but a tunnel connecting them underground). We were headed toward the East Building to see the Edward Hopper exhibit.

I've actually been to a Hopper show before, at the Whitney Museum (I think) in New York City, and this collection was comparable to that one. I think, however, that the overall organization of the pieces was a little better at the previous show.

This show was broken down into several categories. First there was a collection of his etchings (Evening Wind is seen here). The galleries then went through several historical periods, when he lived in Gloucester, MA, then New York City (he took an apartment in 1913 that he lived in until he died in 1967), then he learned to drive and started to spend a lot of time in New England again. Close to the end is a small auditorium which is showing a short film about the artist and his work, narrated by Steve Martin.

After that are two more rooms which have some of his most iconic and famous pieces, including Nighthawks, which is instantly recognizable and probably one of the most-imitated/parodied pieces of art ever. This is a guess on my part, but it's probably second only to the Mona Lisa in that category.

So what happens is that you have a pretty popular exhibit in the first place, which means that you have to get in a line to see it. Spectators get to enter in these dribs and drabs as a means of crowd control, but it doesn't help much; it's still pretty busy in there. But you also get people who will give no more than a cursory glance to the etchings or the Gloucester paintings so they can get to Chop Suey (seen here), or Automat (not--do your own damn research already), because these are the ones with which they feel familiar.

Plus you get the crowd that feels as though, because they read the flyer before they got into the exhibit, they're much more knowledgeable than the rest of us. "Look at the expression on that woman's face," they'll say. "Can't you feel the underlying tension?" Or: "The city is usually so bustling except in his images. Look at all the loneliness, all the isolation, the relative lack of movement." Or: "Did you notice that he paints a lot of telephone poles but never any wires? The poles are reduced to compositional elements." Shut up, already. I read the brochure too but I'm not about to parrot it just to make myself look smarter. 

OK, so you're wading through all of this, and then you get to the short film. And you may stop in and watch for a few minutes. Now, if you're there for the end, you're basically about to get caught up in a whole new rush of people who want to see the last two rooms, which is where Nighthawks, and Gas, and New York Movie (here), and basically several or his most famous works. But now the room is totally gummed up with the lowbrows who want to see only the famous stuff, plus the movie crowd who want to see this stuff and/or just get out already, plus the few serious people who are desperately trying to get a good look at the artworks. We were in Group #3, except for Wee One, who had had just about enough and sat herself in a corner until Daughter and I were ready to leave.

We finished up with Hopper and went through the tunnel to the West Building, where we had some lunch in the café there. Then up into the building where we got to see several paintings and sculptures by Rodin and Degas. The girls liked those a lot, even when Wee One caught grief from a security guard because she'd touched the pedestal of one of the statues. He had a cool way of expressing how she shouldn't touch the artworks, though, so it was a low-stress moment.

All in all, it was a pretty relaxing day. Then we got home and GF had us take out all the Christmas decorations. The girls decorated the tree and GF and I busied ourselves with other aspects of decorating, but we're far from done. In fact, right now the living room looks kind of like Christmas came in and puked all over the place. We'll have the house completely decorated just in time for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I think. 

Pulling Back the Curtain

Dennis Finch: Wait, I just remembered something; you're boring, and my legs work.

--Just Shoot Me, "The Experiment" (9/23/97)

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For those of you who haven't noticed, there are different sorts of blogs out there. No, really!

This becomes especially true when the creative well runs a little dry. Then the posts come in three flavors:

1. There's one type that tends to blather on and on and on and on and on about whatever boring-ass thing comes into their heads, just to get something out there in some kind of frenetic attempt to ensure that their Adoring Public doesn't panic without their daily (or more frequently) fix. I don't read those anymore. Just shut up, already.
2. There's another type that goes kind of meta-post about it, actually musing about the fact that they don't have a lot to say. I could do posts about that as well, but those kind of bore me as well.

I actually pondered doing one of each of these types of posts.

1. I had a little tale about waiting in line at the post office on Monday and how it took a million years because of one woman who, despite being at least my age (and I'm older than most of the local blog crowd, so do the math yourself), had apparently never been in a post office in her life and asked the clerk remarkably inane questions, which meant that my meter ran out and I was out of change and I couldn't take a few extra minutes to get a decent lunch. Posts like this are in the realm of standup comedy about airline food. Some people could get a whole lot of decent mileage out of it, but I can't.   
2. I had another story about picking up Daughter at Penn Station on Tuesday night but even I fell asleep trying to describe how uneventful it was. 

So instead I went the third route, which is:

3. the Meta-Meta-Post, where you get this whole routine about me relating some of the thought processes that wound up killing the last couple of posts I'd worked on.

All of which boils down to the fact that you just read a couple of hundred words of me telling you that I don't have much to say just now. Suckers.

The Get-Along Gang

Darren MacElroy: Banned for life. That's a long time.

--Blades of Glory (2007)

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Yesterday I had quite the early day. I agreed to help a principal with staff development, on a topic that by all rights she should have been doing herself. But, I figured that it was a decent opportunity to get to know some of the teachers in that school, so I took it on.

Getting there (or anywhere) at 7:30 is a drag for me. I'm definitely a night-owl type and am most productive in the late afternoon, shortly after school ends. I usually get a lot more done between 3:00 and 5:00 than I do the rest of the day. Of course, I'm also not dealing with people strolling into my office. But, I am a trouper, so I made the trek and did my bit, which as far as I can tell went pretty well.

A while later I had to go to another school to attend a meeting as the Area Representative. The team was preparing to write an educational program that would send the student to a special program in another building. When I reviewed the materials that were given to me, there was only a psychological report from another school and not much else. Peculiar, I thought. When I entered the special ed office, the ITA (the person who runs the meeting) told me that she'd done some informal assessments on the student and that she was going to combine that information, plus some of the information from the report they already had, into an educational assessment report.

"OK, great," I said. "Where is it?"

When you get a sentence of any kind that begins "I was gonna..." you know it's trouble. But part of this came about when I was told that she'd spoken to my boss and that he was aware that she was writing this report, etc. So now I'm in a weird place. I'm pretty sure it would NOT be OK that this report isn't ready at the beginning of the meeting, but I'm not sure what he'd told her. I excused myself from the room and called him up. I let him know that the report wasn't ready, but fortunately (at the time) the parents weren't there and the meeting was supposed to have begun already. The short version of his response: no report, no meeting. After hanging up, I thought maybe she was just wrapping up the report and I was being a little hasty.

I returned to the office and most of the team had assembled at that point. (By that point, the meeting should have started ten minutes earlier.) I sat down again and looked at the screen that the ITA was working on.

She'd just started writing the report.

I said to the principal, who'd just sat next to me, "I think we need to postpone this meeting."

She replied, "You're kidding."

Annoyed, I pointed to my face: "Is this my 'kidding' face? This team isn't ready for this meeting." (I admit this was a little snotty.) When she asked what I was talking about, so I gave her more detail.

Here's the thing: this person made arrangements for someone from the Area Office to come out and attend this meeting. When it came down to the meeting itself, she, and therefore the team, wasn't prepared to hold the meeting. We can't do this without all of the necessary reports, and I wasn't going to wait around for this person to whip out over an hour's worth of typing in fifteen minutes so that she could produce a substandard report. Basically, this one person wound up wasting several people's time. I offered up a nice, glossed-over version of all this and added, "The only saving grace is that the parents aren't here."

That's when someone said, "Um, the dad is waiting in the main office."

Oh, well, then.

So after calling my boss about it (and his backing me up), the ITA went into the office and apologized and basically took the blame for the team not being able to hold the meeting. While she was out the principal gave me a "talking-to". She didn't appreciate the way I said all this, she didn't like the face thing, I should have taken her aside privately instead of just blurting out in the open room like that, etc.

Now, I took her point, even if I didn't necessarily agree with it completely. And I did explain my side, and I apologized. And I think that's all important, especially to this story. Because I did appreciate her taking the time to talk to me about it right away, and I said so. I had one time when I didn't even know that someone had a problem and later on it turned into a Big Fricken Deal before I even knew what was going on. So when I left the building, in my head it was an incident that was pretty much a done deal.

Later on, I got an email from my boss that took me off the re-scheduled meeting. Part of the email read, "We need to talk.     You are no longer welcome back at [the school].   I could say more, but I am too disappointed to do so. "

So now I'm a little pissed off that there was STILL a problem despite my effort to clear the air and thinking that we're done. But I'm also a little pissed off that my boss is warming up to pull the "more in sorrow than in anger/wounded puppy" routine. You know what? I screwed up. If you want to write me up, write me up. If you want to put me on a Performance Improvement Plan, fine. Do that. But I am not going to put up with a martyr.

And I'm also pretty irritated that he didn't CONTINUE to back me up afterward, because the bottom line is that, if he'd been there in the first place, he would have said much the same thing to the team (except the "face" part). And you can bet that nobody's going to say he can't come back. If I'm there as his representative, the team there should just eat it.

So yeah, I can't wait till Friday when we get to talk. We need to talk, alright, but I hope he doesn't expect a one-sided conversation.    

Leading Cheers, Again

Torrance Shipman: Ever been to a cheerleading competition?
Missy: Oh, you mean like a football game?
Torrance Shipman: No, not a game, those are like practices for us. I'm talking about a tournament. ESPN cameras all around. Hundreds of people cheering.
Cliff: Wait a minute, people cheering... cheerleaders?

--Bring It On (2000)

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Perhaps ESPN wasn't on hand, but when you go to a cheerleading tournament at the First Mariner Arena, you know it's a pretty big deal. And don't let anyone try to convince you that competitive cheering isn't a sport, as you'll see if you watch the video.

GF and I took Wee One to the arena at 7:00 am on Sunday morning. Teams were gathering and organizing on the Hopkins Place side. Some teams came in by bus. At least one team came in using stretch limos, which seems a little...yeah, I don't know. We left the girls and went to the entrance.

The entryway was a mess, with people everywhere and not having much place to go, as they weren't allowing anyone into the arena itself. A rudimentary line of sorts was forming, but it wasn't formed very well. However, some people tried to nudge their way into it, and other people started protesting. It was starting to get ugly. The reason for all this is that the tickets we had were General Admission. This is the sort of thing that gets people stomped at concerts by The Who.

We got inside and managed to get some pretty good seats, thanks to another team mom who knew exactly where to go. We were in Section 107, which is just to the left of the mat, and about six rows back.

The teams that attended this meet were pretty much the same ones that attended the last one a couple of weeks ago. At that meet, Wee One's squad went literally from Worst to First, having been badly beaten in the first meet, so they were definitely The Ones To Beat. However, beating this squad wasn't going to happen. When you watch this, remember that Wee One is the oldest girl in the crowd, at eight years old. (She's the redheaded one who starts to the far left; the camera trails on her as the last one to get to the mat.)

(Click here if you can't see the video above.)

The first thing they do as a group, where they lift, lower and re-lift a girl is called a "pendulum", and it's a pretty high-end routine for this group. The two women in the background who step onto the mat during the "builds" are official spotters. Off camera to each side are Safety Judges, who assess only the safety of the routine (as in, whether appropriate precautions are taken). There are a half-dozen other judges who are seated directly in front of the mat. Each of them has a specialty area, and they all offer an "overall" score. Points get taken away for things like performers bumping into each other, or moving to the wrong place. Stepping off the mat during the routine is a big no-no. It's a faux pas akin to dropping a cheerleader (which, duh, is another big hit on your points). At the end of the video, it's the coaches to whom the girls run for the big hugs.

Despite the level of organization with getting teams ready, on-deck and so forth, and that only five minutes is allotted to each team, there are still a LOT of groups to get through, and they started around 9:15, finishing after noon. Two groups got to go up a second time because of a problem with their music, but in the end it didn't do those groups much good. Then there was an intermission while the professional cheerleaders from the Baltimore Blast did an exhibition, during which the scores were tallied.

We don't get to hear the scores themselves, but we are told where each team places. They do it in reverse order: Sixth place, fifth place and so forth. As the team is called, they jump up from the floor (where they've all assembled during the intermission) and head over to the tables where the prizes are. Anything out of Third Place gets a "participant" trophy.

It's funny: when the girls are this young and it gets close to the end, they don't always understand that if Second Place has been called and they haven't heard their name yet, then they've won. They always wait for the guy to announce First Place. Of course, the coaches are already going berserk by then.

In one case, I could see a girl on another squad hear her team called as being in Fourth Place (last for that group). You could see that she understood that they'd clearly taken last place. It's hard to stand up and slump at the same time, but this poor kid managed it.

So that's it for this year. Next year she'll move up into the next age level, and the coaches will rise with her. The competition at that age level is pretty tough, as I saw here, but I think these girls are equal to the task.

After all, they've got two First Place trophies to defend.

Blue Sea, I'm Ho-oome

Casey McCall: So, the name of this restaurant is Tony Anthony's... Anthony Anthony. In Cuba, Ricky Ricardo would've been Ricardo Ricardo.

--Sports Night, "Small Town" (1/12/99)

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My boss has been wanting to take me out to dinner for awhile. This is something he does a couple of times a year, and we usually have a very pleasant time, even if he does tend to deviate into shop talk. He brought it up a few weeks ago, prefacing it with something we could do when GF was past the surgery.

She's been having some complications, but we decided to take a shot at going last night. So early this week he sent me an email that said we had reservations and that dress was casual. And that was all I knew. Later in the week he told me that we were originally going to Chameleon Cafe, but he didn't like the time that we got for our reservation, so he arranged for a new reservation at a different place. Thus it was that at 7:00 we found ourselves leaving the car with the valets at the Blue Sea Grill on Water (heh) Street.

This restaurant is blue. I mean, it's BLUE, everywhere. Blue carpeting, blue paint, blue lighting...the wall closest to our table was a mosaic of varied shades of blue tiles. This, I think, is what it's like to be taking Viagra. The intent, as I understand it, is to give you that whole "undersea" feeling. They did that at the Finding Nemo ride in Epcot, too.

Actually, the Blue Sea Grill, while indeed blue, is also quite a nice place. It's one of those restaurants where the waitstaff rides that very-helpful-without-being-obsequious line with great ability. We had fried calamari and an oyster cerviche for appetizers, and then we all shared green beans and a lobster macaroni & cheese as side dishes. Frankly I couldn't tell you whether the oysters, or the bed of very thinly sliced vegetables, which had been tossed in a light vinegary sauce, were tastier. For the entree I had the halibut, GF had some shrimp ravioli which was very good. My boss had crabcakes and his date had a seafood paella which looked great. (We didn't share anything between couples.) The waitress caught part of our conversation, which included the fact that GF's birthday was this week, so they gave her a dessert of pineapple upside-down cake, topped with coconut ice cream. We all had some of that as we sipped coffee and tea.

On the way out, we all took a peek into the lobster tank. We'd been told that there was a six-pound lobster in there. At this restaurant, that's a lobster that they'd sell for over $150. Let me tell you, six pounds is a pretty impressive lobster. I think I'd have to broil it because steaming would take too long. And I'd have to share it with everyone else at the table, because otherwise you're talking about eating an entire stick of melted butter along with it, right?

At any rate, we had a very nice time and a great meal, and it was a nice change of pace to just get out of the house for social reasons. 

Lead in the Water = Job Security for Me

Homer: Kids, kids. I'm not going to die. That only happens to bad people.
Bart: What about Abraham Lincoln?
Homer: Uh, he sold poison milk to school children.

--The Simpsons, "Homer's Triple Bypass" (12/17/92)

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OK, I admit it. That was a pretty dark headline.

You may have seen the news that Baltimore City Schools is finally bailing out (heh) on abating the lead in the water fountains. This is a pretty good idea, considering that in many cases the lead wasn't coming from anywhere within the school itself.

For instance, I worked at Cecil Elementary a few years back. During the 2001-2 school year, that building was under comprehensive renovation. I mean, they gutted the place down to a shell and started over. New everything, everywhere. I loved working in that building. And James Drummond, the principal at the time, has been promoted into the Area Office, so I'm working for him again, which is a pretty cool deal. (He's not my direct boss, but still.) But the point is that, except for the exterior brick, we're talking about a brand-new school.

And yet, when they did the comprehensive testing a year or so later, the fountains failed the tests. As near as anyone could figure, it's because the pipes OUTSIDE the building were contaminated. (And thank goodness they're replacing all the water mains in that neighborhood.) The custodians went through a few strategies to make things better, most of which involved flushing all the fixtures in the building for about five minutes each day. This apparently does the trick. The building then became one of the schools to pass the subsequent tests.

However, as an article in today's Baltimore Sun notes,the total costs of these strategies, which includes the cycle of testing and lab fees and staff to oversee the testing (but doesn't count things like the man-hours needed to run all the fixtures in every building for five minutes, or the cost of the water that's simply running down the drain during this process) was comparable to the cost of just putting water coolers in all the buildings. So it was a smart decision on Dr. Alonso's part.

What's amusing to me, as someone who works for BCPSS, is that the press release that went out on this yesterday was at least the third draft. Many of these things go out to the BCPSS system as a whole via email, separately from whenever the press gets ahold of it. For those of you who don't know, when Microsoft Outlook (which is what BCPSS uses for mail handling) is connected to a central mail server, there's a function called "recall" which allows you to cancel the sending of an email. However, it doesn't really prevent the person at the other end from reading an email if they happen to have Outlook open at the time the bad email is sent. So I was able to see that the message went out twice, and was recalled twice, before it finally went out for good. Here's an idea: proofread, THEN hit the "Send" button. 

Another note to BCPSS spies reading this: If you're going to circulate a message like this, you should probably send it as a PDF rather than a Word document, because now everyone in the city has a scanned copy of Dr. Alonso's signature that they can separate from the press release. An unscupulous person could conceivably write any kind of memo now, and put Dr. Alonso's signature on it.

Um...in theory.

For the Record

Man in Pub: [humoring the "invisible man"] Oh, my. Now, how did that happen? There must be a ghost in here.

--Amazon Women on the Moon (1977)

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Awhile back (September 19) someone posted a comment to this blog with regard to Terry Hickey's recent defeat in the 10th District. An excerpt (typos belong to the poster, not to me):

Anyway its done and over and we have 4 years to work on things.Terri did a nice job however he has not been seen at one community meeting siince the election I hope he plans to stay involved with the district. And it was not just for the election that he or any others were active. We need everyone to stay involved and work together.

So given that comment that Terry has not been seen at any community meetings since the (primary) election, which was eight days earlier, I figured perhaps someone should keep a record of political activity at Morrell Park meetings, since we do, after all, need everyone to stay involved. This will be updated regularly.

September 2007: This wasn't a regular meeting but rather the candidate forum. Ed Reisinger was not in attendance. Terry Hickey and the other two City Council candidates were. Michael Sarbanes was there as a mayoral candidate. 

October 2007: Ed Reisinger was not in attendance. Terry Hickey was.

November 2007: No politicians were in attendance, although Morrell Park Community Association Vice President Carol McCoy met with Terry Hickey during the previous month. However, I'm not going to count that.

So, since someone who prides himself on being tight with Ed Reisinger has pointed out the attendance history of someone who isn't even an elected official, it's interesting that the guy who WAS elected hasn't been seen so far.

For what it's worth, he hasn't been seen at a MPCA meeting since April 2006, but who's counting?  

Not Making Fans

Eric Kluster: It was a time consideration, Mike...
Mike Wallace: Time? Bullshit! You corporate lackey! Who told you your incompetent little fingers had the requisite skills to edit me?

--The Insider (1999)

Exeter: Now place your hands above the rail
[hands suddenly attach to the rail]
Exeter: ... they're magnetized.
Crow T. Robot: And if your hands were metal, that would mean something.

--Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996)

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The Baltimore Sun has several blogs in its online edition. I contribute comments to a few of them, including InsideEd (the new name for Classroom Connections), and Reality Check (about Reality TV programs). I also lurk on You Don't Say, which is about word usage.

I've also spent some time with Random Rodricks, which is the blog run by Dan Rodricks (surprise!). Rodricks' blog is a smattering of things that didn't quite make his column, or which may supplement his column in the dead tree edition.

Back on August 22, Rodricks did a short post about that infamous Orioles game, the one which they lost 30-3.  A day or two later I submitted a comment which quoted a joke that David Letterman had used the next night. Now, comments on the Sun's website are moderated, so it doesn't post until it's been OK'd by someone. A short while later I got an email back from Rodricks saying that he hadn't seen the Letterman show in question and thanking me for my submission. However, my comment didn't appear.

On the 27th, Rodricks posted:

Missed this last week -- David Letterman on the Orioles' 30-3 drubbing by the Rangers.

"The Orioles were actually ahead 3-to-nothing earlier in the game. Then they made the mistake of putting up a 'Mission Accomplished' banner."

Basically, he didn't credit me for giving him the quotation. I shrugged it off and moved on.

This past Sunday, his column ended with the following:

Don Imus will be going back to morning radio -- and I'll be going back to not listening.

This would be meaningful if Don Imus had a Baltimore outlet prior to his getting canned. Saying something like this is kind of like my promising never to watch another new episode of Weeds. I don't get Showtime, so it's not a tough promise to keep, get it? So I went to his blog and commented on his most recent item, then made my observation about his not listening to Imus.

A while later I got an email from Rodricks. The first paragraph was what I'd written in my comment:

Today's (Sunday) column mentioned that Don Imus is returning to radio and
you're going to continue not listening to him. That's not so tough,
considering that he hasn't had a radio outlet in Baltimore for a long time
prior to his dismissal...

Rodricks reply:

"Well, duh . . . ."

In addition, he'd excised the above passage from the comment before posting it. I'm not sure what I'm more irritated about, the fact that he'd lopped off my comment, or his rather condescending email response. But this, on top of his prior failure to credit me, is of some concern in my head. I'm still not quite clear on what irritates me about all this in the aggregate, but I'll say this: None of my comments to other Sun blogs are tampered with like this, and I'm going to have to think hard before submitting to this particular one again.