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All I can hear now is Aerle Taree: ‘a game of horseshoes’

We went to a pool party, Saturday. Perfect day to spend in someone’s backyard. Just a lovely day. Very nice people. Let me count … about two dozen people. Kids in the pool, burgers on the grill, enough tables to circulate through to drop in on different conversations. Perfect weather. Someone there will have a big birthday next week, so it was one part that and one part getting all of these different people together.

Played a little cornhole, downplaying the skills, lest anyone become awed by my grasp of geometry and physics. At one point, for phone, I was just knocking other bags out of the air with my bags. And then a score was announced and, well, I can’t lose the game. So I started dropping them directly down the hole, which wasn’t as impressive as it could be, but was held in higher regard than it should be.

I resisted the urge to throw up my hands and yell, “I grew up playing HORSESHOES!”

Because I did, and that game gives you life lessons.

Also Jarts, which gives you other lessons, important lessons about parabolic arcs, escape vectors, eye protection, how to pop your hips and turn from a backpedal into a sprint if it really goes bad, and so on.

One of the kids was working on swimming lengths of the pool entirely underwater. We’ve all done that. I still do that. I might do that the next time I get in the pool. The swim was powerful, fast, ferocious. Three widths of the pool were completed by natural athleticism, fitness and youth. I explained lactic acid buildup, fluidity, efficiency, and wall propulsion. Suddenly, five widths became the standard. I think I felt more accomplished for explaining it than the swimmer did for swimming it. This is what it means to coach others: to see the success of others, to manifest an excitement of achievement that belongs solely to them because, if you did not, it’d just look weird when the thing was done to a level you knew possible.

Another, younger, kid I taught how to use a snorkel. I’m not sure if we progressed well into using it as a submerged breathing tool, but he did delight in blowing water out of the top of the thing. This is always what it means to coach others: to enjoy seeing the delights of others as your success.

Ask someone who played any sort of youth sport about something a coach and a team and their sport taught them that wasn’t about the game itself. That’s what it really means to coach others. I’ve never coached a sport, but I had those coaches. It’s invaluable. I coached college students on student media for 15 years — they won a bunch of awards and a lot of them have gone on to satisfying and important work in the media and someone of them just enjoyed their time their for their own reasons. And I think about that aspect of what a mentor or a coach can be when I think about that work. In this case, what is the confidence that grows in seeing yourself improving a skill by 67 percent based on just one conversation? What joy can you provide yourself by seeing how far you can discharge water out of a silly looking bent plastic tube?

Which is to say it was a nice pool party for me, and, also, I won at Cornhole.

We went to a rock ‘n’ roll show last night. Matt Nathanson was the opener. Still doing his breathy-graveling, coffee shop singer-songwriter thing. He was a 15-year-overnight success in 2008. He’s done now something like a dozen studio albums, two live albums, a bunch of EPs. He’s got a great stage presence. Its not every opener that you’re determined to get there on time for, or that everyone around you will shut up for, but we should, and Nathanson is one of them.

It was a night of three acts. More featuring Matt Nathanson later in the week. I’ll have another, different clip tomorrow.

Back to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. (This is not a book club, but if you pick this up and read along we can pretend. Either way, you should consider the book, it is a great, terrific, and informative read.) One of the things that I always appreciate about Atkinson’s work is how he uses these lists as a sort of a daily street-level census of things. The more texture like this you give a story, the more I’m inclined to lean into it. Atkinson always seems to do that in these descriptive ways that never seem too onerous, never lose the thread of where his story is going, and yet gives you real flashes of this moment that we can’t physically inhabit.

Obviously I’m not prepared to fact-check him on this. Possum meat? Few of us are. But he’s a well regarded popular historian and I’m sure this has all been carefully examined to the extent possible. I have no reason to think otherwise, but I often think: how long does it take him, or the people that wind up in the acknowledgments of the book, to pull enough color together so that it can go into this one paragraph? Just the assemblage of information, let alone whatever time it took to write it, re-write it, edit it, re-work it again. And it’s merely a part of his style.

And one more reason I’m enjoying the book and suggesting it to others.

memories / music / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
15
Jul 26

Red and black antennae

I get the summers to myself. Oh, to be sure, we went to two conferences this summer, but we were fortunate to attach a vacation to them. Otherwise, aside from some email, there’s some time to decompress, to sleep, and to try to forget about work while simultaneously also thinking about the next semester.

And, look, before I get into this let me say two things. First, the time off is great, and I’m fortunate, and I know it. Second, the work isn’t hard or bad, it’s rather enjoyable, generally, but each semester is so immersive that the break feels necessary somehow. Third, see points one and two.

With that in mind my complaint is There’s always something, right? It’s not worth going into, and none of it is a real worry on a large scale, let alone a grand or cosmic scale. But the worrywart can always worry, I suppose. Part of it has to do with the next semester, and my utter inability to make myself totally mentally absent. It’s just funny is all.

But then, today, I think I have hit the mental midpoint of the summer. Probably I’m close to the calendar midpoint, too, but I’m not looking that up, that’d be too upsetting to contemplate, and, anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that I was sitting there, reading, and it occurred to me that I should go look through my coins. I have a dime jar and a nickel jar and I don’t even know why anymore. It isn’t like I get a lot of change, or have money. Anyway, I found myself remembering that we used to look at the dates on nickles for some reason. When I was a kid we kept nickels that were older than 1964 for reasons I forget. So I went through probably 15 bucks of nickels, because I could.

This was the oldest one I found in that collection. I looked it up. According to the web, a 1957 nickel could be worth a few thousand bucks, or about five or 10 cents. Guess which one I’ve got. They’re all worth a nickel, unless you find a sucker.

Jefferson’s war nickels, the ones produced between 1942-1945 can be worth a bit, depending on the specifics. Because of war rationing they were minted with 35 percent silver. When was the last time you saw a coin from the mid-40s? And are you prepared to say mid-nineteenforties? Guess we’ll be doing that soon.

I began to wonder if you can solder coins. Some of these could be some sort of art. (Turns out you can solder coins.) It’s not as if they are doing anything else, sitting in these little glass containers.

I was doing this because I had the time, I guess. My chief task for the day was keeping two electricians hydrated. These two guys came out today to do some electrical work, obviously. We are having a generator installed. The unit itself was brought in today and put on a little slab on the southwestern corner of the house, because that’s where the gas meter is. The electric comes in on the northeastern corner.

The problems are there are some tight spaces, some old DIYesque wiring, the solar panel configuration, incredibly hot temperatures, and horrible air quality. These poor guys, we invited them inside to cool off several times.

I kept them in ice water all day. I offered them giant umbrellas for shade. There’s no need to suffer, but theirs is outdoor work. Mostly, anyway. I think they’ve been taking refuge in the basement, where it is nice and cool, and where everything will be connected, gas to electric.

They’ll be back out to continue their work tomorrow. It’ll be just as hot or worse. They’ll have to disconnect the power for a while to finish their work.

Also the air quality will be poor. Also, they might not finish tomorrow. These poor depleted guys.

We saw the Dave Matthews Band Saturday night. Third summer in a row. I think this is the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen them over the years. We go to this show because my godsisters’-in-law (just go with it) do a DMB pilgrimage every summer. They invite us to the show closest to us. They tailgate with their old school buddies and friends and we get to tag along.

At some point the joke became that I don’t like Dave Matthews and I must have reacted just right, because that joke persisted. Later, I came up with a brilliant reply. I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me my favorite Dave Matthews song, so I can say “I like that Ants Running song.” As a joke it’ll work on several levels. I have the name wrong, and some of the longtime fans are over it, including one of my godsisters-in-law.

This isn’t that, but rather a bit of a meandering horn section, just for fun.

They played Ants Marching. I turned to my godsister-in-law at the end and said, “I like that song. They should put that on the radio. That’s got pep!”

She was not amused with my joke, but she had a great time at the concert, and so did all of the fans, even me. I like the band just fine.

cycling / memories / music / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
14
Jul 26

Evening sounds

Poison ivy update: today marks three weeks from my careless self-exposure. Tomorrow marks three weeks from the first itchy symptoms. I am much improved — which is to say healing, not healed. Eventually I worked it out to alternating between Calamine and cortisol. I also had a few very long oatmeal bath soaks. Now, my skin is mostly dry, itchy, flaky, or some combination.

Also, I found some on a tree while puttering about the yard. I dealt with that one in a much more sensible manner.

In short, I will survive, but the ivy probably will too.

The actual poison ivy vines I plucked, meanwhile, have surely returned by now.

Enjoy a nice little solo ride this evening. My lovely bride was off doing a workout elsewhere and that let me visit some lovely little roads at my own pace.

I made some new sheep friends. They couldn’t even be bothered to look up as I soft pedaled past their evening graze.

The corn is coming along nicely. Took me three tries to get this photo, and it wasn’t quite what I wanted.

The chores never end in farm country. I wonder what else this guy could be doing right now. I wonder if he’d rather be pedaling around, like me. I think most people would rather be riding a bike than doing evening work. Then again, combines aren’t connected to bikes.

Sometime after that I dropped a water bottle — a fate worse than dehydration. So I had to turn around and fetch it. Stop, put your foot down, wiggle the bike around and coast a few feet the other direction. Then bend waaaaay over to the ground without hurting yourself. And then you stab yourself with greasy gears.

I have joked that I should just get that as a tattoo and save myself some time. I won’t, but then again it has been a while since I gave myself the ol’ grease tattoo, too.

I wore a new jersey today, a loose fitting number, which was perfect for one of those days when it didn’t matter that everything clung to me. And on the back of the tag …

Sure, now you tell me. Good thing it fit.

It’s actually too big, but I took that tag off.

One last clip from the Guster show, last Friday. Their alt-breakthrough, now 28 years old (that was a great time to be listening to 99X), somehow, fell off the live show list for a long time. I guess you get tired of playing the same things every night at some point. Also, the ping pong balls were probably becoming a problem. (People used to throw them onto the stage at the end of the song. It makes sense with the song, moreso than having to bring the things into venues, I’m sure.) Also, you have other things you want to play. Or maybe you’re just looking for ways to do old things. I think they called this version Airport Song 2000 for a while. It has an entirely different feel.

I wonder if they’ll have another re-instrumentation for the 30th in 2028.

Anyway, great show Friday night. I’ll put up a little clip of a DMB song from Saturday’s show tomorrow. Also, we’ll be talking about generators.

Monday / music / photo / video — Comments Off
13
Jul 26

Tessera mihi est, ergo sum

Without hesitation I can say that the highlight of today was updating my university password. Passphrase, actually. This must be done every six months — if the system remembers it. (It doesn’t always seem to remember it.) But, without fail, in those times I must update it, I always find myself in a struggle. You log in to things several times a day and your fingers get into habits. And then, of course, it is time to update the password. Passphrase. Except I’ve noticed the last two times that the requirements have continued to grow expansive.

I use a sentence, and my now expired passphrase included a special character and a number. Now I have to make sure the new passphrase checks all of those boxes.

Hilariously, the form field where you input this does not show the characters you are typing, just the little privacy dots, as if my books or my cats are going to steal the new password. Passphrase. So you better get it right. Of course, it must be confirmed. And you better write this down. So I have it written down in a place where only I will find it. Because security.

We all remember the Instructure debacle of 2026, after all.

And now I will have to retrain my fingers to type this new phrase. Hopefully I’ll be in shape before I have to do this in front of students. Nothing builds confidence in the classroom like messing that up three times in a row.

Also, when you have completed the not-at-all challenging task of designing a new passphrase and making sure you’ve met all of the criteria now involved you are encouraged to update this in the places where it needs to be updated.

Because no one remembers the Instructure debacle of 2026, after all.

It’d be nice if every place where you had to login to something had committed to the same series of special character challenges, but that’s a lot to coordinate and keep straight, of course. And all of this is just another step toward my computer having a fingerprint pad on it, at which point I will retreat to Walden.

We saw another show Saturday night. I’ll give you four hints.

The second hint is that this act was at a different venue, a much larger venue. (Don’t worry, we won’t go through the naming origins this time. OK, fine, it is named after an 18th century British lawyer.)

The third hint is that this band is marking the 30th anniversary of their first Grammy, which is to say they’ve been around for a while. And, in that time, they’ve cultivated and maintained quite the following.

OK, final hint, if a bit in profile.

It was Dave Matthews Band, which we have seen a few years in a row now, attending with friends. All told, I think this marks the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen them over the course of their touring career. If you like them, they put on a good show. If you like jam bands, they put on a good show. If you’re just determined not to like them, you probably won’t like the show. I feel like I always come away from the show thinking the appreciation outpaced the expectation just a bit, whatever that means.

I think what it means is that I’ve seen several bands and singers more than a few times and I’ve decided there are only so many you need to see more than a few times. And, if I had to make a list, I wouldn’t put DMB on that list, but when I leave the show I find myself thinking, That was a good time. Because it is!

It isn’t that it is a surprise, but what is surprising is that they’ve built up this huge legion of concert followers over the many decades and they continue to put up shows with enough energy and fun that people keep coming back, dozens and dozens of times.

I wonder if Dave and his buddies thought about that way back when. I wonder if anyone does.

Take Guster, for example. We saw them Friday. Next year they’ll mark the 30th anniversary of the record that turned them into a regular airplay band. I know they’ll celebrate that because Friday night they mentioned that this is the 20th anniversary of a subsequent record. The threesome met in school, at Tufts. No way they sat around on campus in 1991 and said, “Man, I hope one day we’re filling stage banter with an ad lib about the region we’re touring in when we are 53 years old!”

Maybe that’s the dream. Do something you love with people you like and get to do it so long and so well that you can also pursue other things you are interested in, too. I’m certain that’s the dream, actually. But no one says that at 18. No 18-year-old has the foresight. (Shoot, I was 26 when I figured it out, and I’ve spent the years since wondering if I actually did.)

Existentialism is definitely going to be incorporated into my next password. Passphrase.

adventures / music / photo / video — Comments Off
10
Jul 26

They don’t all have a trumpet

Did you know there’s a place named Jim Thorpe? I didn’t. Now I know what you’re thinking, “Is that Mauch Chunk?” And if you’re thinking that, you are correct, and you also have Wikipedia opened in another tab. If you don’t: Mauch Chunk was a coal mining town, a company town. Jim Thorpe is buried there. He has no other affiliation with the thing. He was put in the ground there for money. His wife needed the cash, wanted to avoid the potter’s field and the town wanted a boon. And that was 1954. His grave sits on soil taken from Oklahoma, Thorpe’s home, and from the Stockholm Olympic Stadium, the site of Thorpe’s Olympic glory. From 2010 through 2015 the fate of his remains worked their way through the legal system. Family wanted him moved home, but he’s staying right there. And that’s what I learned from Wikipedia.

We were there for a show. There’s a venue in the middle of the woods on the top of a hill and it’s removed enough from everything else that the developers put a little restaurant on the side of the joint. It does a brisk business of perfectly forgettable food. You’re there for the show, anyway. And that was our purpose.

We saw Guster this evening. First time this year. The guy that sat next to me at the show was an old man. He said he has been listening to them since he was in college. So have I. But there’s no way I’m as old as that guy. He’d never seen the band before, though, he knew the first half of their catalog cold. I told him he was in for a great show. This was the seventh time in the last three years, I think. They never disappoint. He seemed to have a great time in his old man way.

Seriously, I am not as old as that man.

Concert photography is challenging. I am not a concert photographer; I’m also not a photographer, but I like these, each is pleasing for their own reasons. I like the rainbow light treatments, and how they silhouette Adam Gardner and Luke Reynolds.

Ryan is cropped off center, which is funny in a bunch of different ways, but in the full light as he stands over his keyboard.

And here’s the Thunder God himself, Brian Rosenworcel, warbling his way through the song of the summer.

(It was “Soak Up The Sun.” I thought maybe he’d reprise his Bonnie Tyler cover.)

From Easy Wonderful:

I’ve got a couple of others. I’ll share a few short clips next week.

Wikipedia also tells me Mauch Chunk is derived from the term Mawsch Unk, meaning Bear Place in Unami, the language of the native Lenape, possibly a reference to Bear Mountain, an extension of Mauch Chunk Ridge that resembled a sleeping bear.