personal – Page 18

Greatest hits: Thailand scam

[Reproduced and edited from e-mail.]

In 2001, Andrea and I went to Thailand, our last travel hurrah before starting a family. While we were in Bangkok, we were roped into the famous Thai “gem scam.” The funny thing is that we had been warned repeatedly about this scam and others, both by friends who’d been to Thailand and by the Lonely Planet guidebook, which we read faithfully before arriving. It described the exact scam, but we still didn’t recognize it when it happened.

We arrived in Bangkok late at night and went right to sleep. The next morning we opened our guidebook and decided to take a walking tour in the vicinity of the Grand Palace and Wát Pho. From our fancy, sheltered Western-style business hotel we rode the water taxi up the Chao Phraya to the correct stop, got off the boat, and stepped into the streets of the most foreign and exotic place we’d ever been. We oriented ourselves and found a bank where I exchanged some currency. Then, trying to decide in which direction to start off, a friendly Thai gentleman with excellent English offered us help. We were mindful of the “don’t let anyone change your plans” rule, but that was no reason to be impolite; we struck up a conversation together. When we mentioned that we planned to see Wát Pho, he gestured to it across the street and said, “It’s closed until 2pm today,” saying something about a monthly Buddhist observance. Sure enough, the gates were closed and chained. “But there is much else to do until then,” he offered, and said his friend the tuk-tuk driver would take us to several sites for the next few hours for only 40 baht, waiting for us at each stop. Circling points of interest on our map, the gentleman suggested we see the Golden Mount, Wát Traimit, and one or two other things before returning to Wát Pho, by which time it will have reopened. “You should also see the Export Center,” he said, “where they sell gems and other goods at a huge discount. It’s not where the tourists go, it’s where the pros go, and furthermore today is the last day of an annual nationwide two-week sale.” The Export Center was conveniently located between two of the attractions on the map.

We were wary at first but the friendly gentleman was persistent and finally we agreed to his plan. Off we went in the tuk-tuk into Bangkok traffic — a harrowing, smelly, exhilarating thrill-ride! We loved each of the attractions we saw.

At Wát Saket, we ran into another friendly Thai gentleman who welcomed us to his country and offered to give us some of the history of the wát, which is where he did his monastic training many years ago, and where his family has an affiliation. For the next twenty minutes or so he was our tour guide, giving us the history of Thai Buddhism, interpreting the temple’s murals, explaining proper respectful behavior, and so on. (The image at left was taken by him.) As we were taking our leave to go back to the tuk-tuk driver, he asked what our plans were for the rest of the day. We mentioned the remaining stops on our tuk-tuk ride, and when we said Export Center, he seemed surprised. “How did you know about that? That’s not a place that tourists usually go.” Then he told us how lucky we were to know about that, because of this sale that’s going on and because of the excellent prospects for buying good gems at cheap Thai prices and selling them back in the U.S. at enough of a profit to pay for our whole vacation. “Look for this symbol,” he said, showing us a majestic spread-winged bird on his Thai Airlines business card, “it denotes government-approved gemsellers. And ask for stones with triple-A ratings.”

We thanked him and continued on our way. When we came to the Export Center, we were surprised to see that it wasn’t the bustling center of commerce that its name suggests. It was a little storefront down a side street with no customers. Inside, we got bottled water and some much-needed air conditioning, and a high-pressure sales pitch, during which the salesman showed a certificate bearing the spread-winged bird and mentioned “triple-A rating” several times. Fortunately our sales resistance was high. Meanwhile, we wandered into an adjacent tailor shop and had some beautiful silk clothing tailored!

We finished our tuk-tuk drive, having returned to Wát Pho and made friends with our driver, who struggled with English while we struggled with Thai. That’s when we discovered that the gates to Wát Pho are always chained closed on that side of the street. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until much later, back at the hotel, that it slowly dawned on me that the whole thing was exactly the gem scam that I’d been repeatedly warned about: the friendly Thai gentleman; the bogus claim of a closed tourist attraction; the dramatically underpriced tuk-tuk ride; the friendly stranger who happens to confirm the first gentleman’s information; the one-day-only sale; the promise of big profits from carrying Thai gems back to the U.S. I’d read all those details in the Lonely Planet guides twice in the previous week!

They say forewarned is forearmed, but it wasn’t this time. Reading this now, it’s probably hard to imagine how we could have been fooled and still consider ourselves reasonably intelligent people. Chalk it up to the bewilderment of being in such a strange place for the first time, and the light touch of a good con artist, who can make you feel as if everything was your idea in the first place. (Note how it was we who mentioned the Export Center to the second con man, not the other way around.) A good con artist can sometimes even leave you completely unaware that you were fleeced at all.

Fortunately, most cons rely on greed, to which I’m pleased to say we did not succumb. And in the meantime, we got a much more thorough introduction to Bangkok than we otherwise would have; an informative guided tour of a Buddhist temple; a very welcome air-conditioning break; a tailored silk suit for me, which I’d always wanted but could never afford at Western prices, and a tailored silk dress for Andrea; and all for a dollar paid to the tuk-tuk driver. So who conned whom?

After sending the above story to some friends who had been to Thailand a few years earlier (and who had warned us about scams), I learned that they’d fallen for the same scam when they were there! Many details from their experience were identical to ours. I wrote some more about the experience in a reply to them, which follows.

I wonder why the claim of employment by Thai Airlines seems to be part of the scam. Is it simply that it’s one of the few respectable Thai businesses that westerners are likely to have heard of? Or is it to back up the claim of frequent trips abroad to sell Thai gems at a profit?

Our guy claimed to be a pilot with Thai Airlines, and showed us his business card, which said his name was Somchai. I said, “Oh, I’m also a pilot.” Later he mentioned having family members in Jamaica, Queens, who pay for their visits to Thailand by transporting and selling gems. I said, “Hey, I’m from Queens!”

Now, if I’m a con man, and my patter includes having a somewhat exotic profession and family members in a city on the other side of the world, and my mark says “me too” to both of those claims, I’d be sweating bullets! But Somchai kept his cool.

On our last day in Bangkok, we had only a couple of hours to see the Grand Palace and Jim Thompson’s House, both of which we’d skipped on the first leg of our trip. We found a cab driver to take us both places (at breakneck speed — there was lots of traffic and very little time before those attractions closed) and then back to the hotel. During the ride, we became friendly with the driver, as we did with nearly everyone we met in Thailand. On the way back to the hotel, he asked our permission to stop at his “sponsor,” a gem store where he gets a coupon for free gasoline whenever he brings in tourists. (I imagine he also gets a commission for any sales that result.)

This helped us to understand the gem scam a little better. Of course we agreed. We were under no obligation except to spend ten minutes or so in the store, and the driver was both friendly and up-front about the kickback scheme. After having experienced the scam firsthand, we appreciated his candor. And unlike the “Export Center,” this sponsor was a real hub of commerce. It was a giant retail store taking up much of a block on a main street, with customers streaming in and out and lines of taxi and tuk-tuk drivers outside waiting for their passengers. A line of pretty Thai hostesses greeted us at the entrance. As we approached, the one on the end peeled off and escorted us inside to a counter where we got complimentary soft drinks. There, a matronly lady with perfect English took us on a tour of the jewellers’ lab, where a few dozen men labored meticulously shaping settings, polishing stones, and so on. In the next room were rows and rows and rows of display cases full of obviously-much-higher-quality jewelry than at the “Export Center.” Scrolling LED displays prominently placed throughout the store proudly boasted, “ISO 9001 Certified.”

They didn’t have any platinum settings. If they had, I just might have sprung for the sapphire ring Andrea’d been bugging me for.

I have a book recommendation for you: The Big Con, by David Maurer. It’s from 1940 or so and is a legendary classic among documentary books about real live con games. You’ll recognize that most of the plot of The Sting, plus some character names, come from this book. (If you haven’t seen The Sting, see it before reading the book!)

That I read this book only a few months ago and still didn’t recognize the scam while it was happening boggles my mind. I understand a little better the truism that I read elsewhere once: con men, apparently, are the easiest marks.

Pillsbury Dough Bob

At the beginning of 2005 I weighed 180 pounds. I was determined to shed twenty of those pounds in time for my birthday in October. And I did!

The red line in this graph was my daily goal and the green line was my actual weight, which I measured faithfully under identical conditions each day. By the end, not only was I getting compliments on my improved appearance, but my occasional asthma and reflux problems had disappeared and my clothes fit better.

I did it by eating much more sensibly (n.b. not “dieting”) and by committing myself to riding my bike a few times a week. In fact, via this modest common-sense program I got lean and strong enough by September to make a decent showing in the “Great SF Bike Ride” preceding the San Francisco Grand Prix bicycle race.

Of course I celebrated with some birthday cake — not just on my birthday, but on each of the several days that followed, as there was plenty left over. Halloween followed soon thereafter, and I wasn’t about to let my kids eat all that candy themselves, now was I? Naturally I stuffed myself on Thanksgiving, and then it was the Christmas season with cakes, cookies, and candy everywhere.

My discipline was destroyed. By March I was back up to 170. By yesterday I was back up to 180. I look and feel terrible. My pants are too tight. My asthma and reflux are back. Today I had to run to catch a train and all but collapsed in a gasping heap after two blocks, watching the train disappear into the distance.

So today begins a new campaign: to reach 150 by my birthday in 2007. You can follow the progress in the graph at the bottom of the sidebar on the front page of this blog.

A friend to many, a hero to all

After writing my previous blog post I tried to find traces of my childhood friend Jon online. I’d tried once before and the pickings were slim, but I thought it would be fun to get back in touch with him. It had probably been twenty years since our last contact. Not long ago I reconnected with many high school friends and had enjoyed it more than I’d expected, and so it was with determination that I sought to reforge this old bond.

I found the same few scraps online that I’d found in my prior try a few years ago: a line item in a genealogy database that might have been him; the masthead of a college humor newspaper that was almost certainly him; one or two other citations that probably were not him. Then I found the page that brought me up short: his obituary.

ROPPOLO-Jonathan. January 12, 1966 — May 14, 2002. Beloved son of Steve and Sondra, loving brother and brother-in-law of Peter and Barbara, cherished uncle, nephew and cousin. A friend to many, a hero to all. Burial held at Pinelawn Cemetery on May 16, 2002.

I should not have been surprised. Jon struggled with kidney disease for as long as we were friends in elementary school and beyond, with disastrous results for his growth and, more than likely, his general health. When I first learned of his illness in third grade, and his need to disappear after school three times a week for dialysis treatments, it was, in typical self-centered kid fashion, an annoyance for me — my best friend, unavailable after school more often than not! For Jon’s part, if he ever felt differently about it — if he ever despaired or wallowed in self-pity — I certainly never knew about it. But his bravery about it was the least of the ways in which Jon was a hero to me.

In some ways, I mark second grade — the year I met Jon — as the beginning of the long trip that made me the person I am today. Everything before that was preparation. The kids I hung out with were just playmates. Jon was the first person whose friendship changed me, my personality developing in response to the challenges posed and the standards set by his.

Jon was smart and funny far beyond his years, that was plainly evident to me even at age seven. When I’d “play” Emergency! or The Six Million Dollar Man with other kids, the action consisted mostly of running and jumping and fighting and so on. But with Jon the action was more cerebral — plotting some Mission: Impossible-style deception, for instance, or figuring out how to safely escape a disabled helicopter plummeting from the sky. (Solution: by stripping naked and tying our clothes into makeshift parachutes.)

Grownups found him smart and funny. With him, I was out of my depth. He was schooled in B. Kliban, Monty Python, the Marx Brothers, George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Abbott and Costello. Fortunately I was an eager and responsive audience and student, which explains why he hung around with me. In future friendships I always gravitated toward those with whose wit and wisdom I could just barely keep up, but Jon was the first who forged my habit of surrounding myself with my betters, a habit that I believe has made me better than I might have been.

A few Jon anecdotes stick out in my mind:

Soon after he and his family moved from their apartment down the block to their own house (just a few blocks away), one afternoon I was visiting when Jon suggested we try his Ouija board. (As usual, Jon was way ahead of me. I had never heard of Ouija boards and he had to explain them to me.) For extra atmosphere we took it up to his attic, which was loaded with cartons from the recent move. We proceeded to contact the spirit of a caveman from the dawn of human history. Expressing great skepticism, Jon and I insisted that he prove, somehow, that he was real, and we gave him to the count of three to do it. Exactly on 3, a pile of boxes in the far corner of the attic toppled over.

We raced down the attic stairs like they weren’t even there, down to the first floor, out the front door and across the street before staring back at Jon’s house in terror and awe.
Jon’s dad was in the advertising business, thus connected to the entertainment industry. In the fall of 1977 he scored a five-minute super-8 reel of footage from Star Wars! The footage was silent and in black-and-white, but in those pre-VCR days and in the full flush of brand-new Star Wars fandom (and desperate for a fix), this was huge. Two scenes were included: Luke talking to Ben Kenobi in Kenobi’s hut; and the escape-from-the-Death-Star sequence, including the TIE fighter attack on the Millennium Falcon.

We watched the reel again and again and again. Since it was silent, we supplied our own running commentary. Every time Luke objected to Ben that he can’t accompany him to Alderaan, we made fun of his whining. Every time Han Solo told Luke, “Come on, buddy, we’re not out of this yet,” we narrated, “Han goes up…” as Han Solo climbed the ladder to his laser cannon turret, “…and Luke goes down” as Luke descended to his.

Imagine my amazement when, decades later and without prompting, my own kids provided the identical narration for that scene when watching Star Wars on DVD.
Once, for no reason I can fathom today, I insisted to Jon that I was an undercover government cyborg. He called bullshit on me, of course, but rather than own up to this bizarre fabrication, I dug in my heels and did my best to convince him that I was telling the truth. Obviously my best wasn’t very good, because Jon was nowhere near fooled. When Jon’s mom got wind of this, she gave me a stern lecture about fibbing that has stayed with me ever since.

In sixth grade, a handful of students from my school were invited to take the citywide Hunter College High School entrance exam. I passed, and so did my two best friends: Jon and David. David and I pleaded with Jon to join us in attending Hunter, but Jon chose to stay local (perhaps for health reasons). After that we inevitably drifted apart. I’d get a scrap of news about him from time to time, and during college I ran into him once or twice when visiting the old neighborhood, but that’s all.

Part of Jon lives on through me. At a time in my life when most kids were focused on things, he introduced me to the world of ideas. He led me around it for a while until I felt comfortable. I’ve never left. According to his obituary, he died a “cherished uncle.” I know that means some lucky nieces or nephews had their horizons broadened too, and that Jon’s legacy is assured.

The way things work out

During the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade, my family made a trek to the Catskills for the summer to rent a bungalow, as we’d done every summer since I was 4. As usual, we brought only as much as we could cram into the car in addition to the four of us. My sister and I were obliged to leave many beloved toys behind. I also left behind my new best friend, Jon, whose family stayed in the city for the summer.

I resolved to write Jon a letter from Monticello. But of course that good intention fell by the wayside as I got reacquainted with summer friends and day camp started. There were woods to explore, new pinball games in the “casino,” and clusters of Japanese beetles to crunch disgustingly underfoot. Now and then I’d renew my promise to write to Jon, but I never followed up.

About halfway through the summer I hit on the idea of tape-recording a voice message to Jon instead of writing to him. I persuaded my dad to bring my tape recorder to the country on his next trip from the city. (All the dads went to New York for the week to work, and came back on the weekends. All the moms stayed in the bungalows all summer and played mah jongg with each other. Life was exactly as depicted in the movie A Walk On the Moon, except I don’t remember any moms being as sexy as Diane Lane.)

Sunday night I sent a newly recorded tape back to New York with my dad, full of reports for Jon from the country, expressions of how much I missed him, reminders of our various silly in-jokes, and plans for what we’d do in the fall when we were reunited. My dad obligingly delivered the tape to Jon’s family some time during the week. I was rewarded the following week with a tape of my own from Jon, sounding delighted and bringing me up to date on his summer.

Years later I learned that it was during my absence early that summer that Jon was diagnosed with kidney disease and condemned to a lifetime of lengthy dialysis treatments multiple times per week. His parents were crushed, and Jon was so depressed that they feared more for his state of mind than his kidneys. Just when things seemed darkest, my long-procrastinated missive to Jon arrived. Just like that, Jon snapped out of his funk and resumed being a normal eight-year-old. To me the timing of the tape was an accident. To his mom it was literally a miracle.

Fast-forward three decades or so. I routinely exchange pleasantries with a checkout clerk named Lora at my local supermarket. We ask after each other’s families, she watches my kids grow up, etc. On one visit she mentions that she used to be a flight attendant — furloughed after 9/11, natch — and hopes to be one again. I think to myself that I should give her my copy of Plane Crazy, a musical comedy about flight attendants in the 1960’s. Via Boing Boing I learned of the musical and joined the mailing list of its creator, Suzy Conn; that’s how I scored a free DVD of a performance of the show.

Weeks go by. Either I forget to bring my DVD to the supermarket when I shop, or Lora isn’t on duty when I’m there. Finally a few days ago she, I, and the disc are all in the same place at the same time, and I present it to her. Her gratitude is out of proportion to my gesture — until I learn that her elderly mother had died only a few days earlier and she was in need of something to cheer her up. Any earlier or later and the gift would not have done nearly as much good.

Funny how these things work out. The universe gives you what you need, even through such unreliable agents as I.

The fifth anniversary of 9/12

Notice how, unlike every other website in the world, I had nothing about the 9/11 anniversary yesterday? That was by design. I always like to be different.

Now, though, a few words about 9/11. The first thing I remember from that day was Andrea holding out the phone to me, saying, “It’s Steve.” I’d slept in, and he called to talk to Andrea about some work-related thing. To me he said (knowing I’m from New York), “I hope you didn’t know anyone in the World Trade Center.”

I couldn’t parse his statement. At that moment, in my mind, which was still foggy from sleep, the Twin Towers still stood. “Didn’t know anyone in the World Trade Center when?”

Steve must have been surprised that I hadn’t heard the news. (Neither had Andrea, for that matter.) “The World Trade Center is gone.”

This made as little sense to me as his first statement. “Gone? What do you mean?”

“The Twin Towers collapsed. They’re gone.”

Nothing could be clearer than what he was telling me, but I still asked him to clarify two or three more times. Not until a minute later, when I turned on the news and saw smoke plumes where the Twin Towers had stood, did I really understand what Steve had been saying.

Andrea was pregnant with our first son. I told Andrea the news, slightly fearful of the effect it could have on the pregnancy. (None, thankfully.) Then of course we were obsessed all day with finding out more, like everyone else in the world.

It’s only five years later but it’s already hard to summon up exactly the feelings of dread and suspicion that descended everywhere at that time. That very night, walking Alex along a side street in Mill Valley, I saw a man sitting in a parked car in the dark. A terrorist! A few weeks later I had to drive to Santa Clara for a job interview and I took the long way (around the San Francisco Bay) rather than cross the obvious-terrorist-target Golden Gate Bridge.

American flags sprung up everywhere. I told Andrea I wanted to hang one outside of our window to show solidarity with our fellow citizens, but I never did because even in the earliest days, the flag was transforming from a symbol of national unity to one of creepy jingoism.

After the Supreme Court decision that had handed the presidency to Bush, public discourse on the subject of that bizarre election and its bizarre conclusion had shut down completely. To me and Andrea and others who viewed it as a high crime against our beloved democracy, it was a maddening time. Only in the few weeks immediately preceding 9/11 did that freeze begin to thaw. A couple of books on the subject, one by Alan Dershowitz and one by Vincent Bugliosi, had appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. We’d even gone to hear Bugliosi speak in Oakland just a day or two earlier. Of course 9/11 obliterated the national discussion of Election 2000.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (when the death toll was still unclear and the exact workings of the Bush west wing were not yet known) I wrote the following. (Rereading it now, it’s depressing to be reminded that my sense of outrage was already exhausted five years ago. Just as I’ve learned about physical exhaustion from having first one child and then two, no matter how exhausted you think you are, there will be a time in the future when you’ll look back and say, “That was nothing!”)

It’s George W. Bush’s world. We just vote in it.

Just when it looked like George Bush would finally learn that political actions have consequences, he showed us again that the normal rules don’t apply to him

Bill Clinton should have been a hard act to follow. A Rhodes scholar and a professor of Constitutional law who pulled himself up from poverty and abuse to lead his country and the world through the most prosperous period in human history, his Vice President nevertheless couldn’t use his boss’s accomplishments to advance his own campaign for fear of being tarnished by the public’s distaste for Clinton’s personal weaknesses.

Instead, we got a lazy son of privilege who can’t find a grammatical sentence with two hands and a flashlight; who partied on drugs and women ’til he was embarrassingly old, deserted his military post, ran a healthy business into the ground, boasted about his mediocre school grades and about napping through his term as Texas governor, wiped out a record budget surplus at a single stroke, and alienated our international friends — and he’s enjoying the highest presidential approval ratings ever recorded.

A whole lot of Americans have been in a permanent state of astonishment regarding Bush’s residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Our jaws only dropped further when Bush audaciously populated his administration with hardliners and old Reagan-era cronies, rather than exhibiting the humility and conciliation called for by an incredibly close election (which, numerically, he lost).

Before September 11th, things were starting to look pretty good to Bush-bashers. Polls showed Bush’s mishandling of the economy was coming home to roost. Democrats were beginning to dictate the agenda. Bush’s beloved boondoggle, the missile shield, looked like it wouldn’t even survive one round of budget negotiations. Discouraged Republicans in Congress were announcing their retirement. A tasty scandal was brewing around Vice President Cheney and the possibility of oil-industry influence-peddling. Books taking the GOP and the Supreme Court to task for their roles in the aftermath of Election 2000 were bestsellers, and there were faint stirrings about Supreme Court impeachment investigations.

It looked like there was justice after all. We never doubted (some of us began to say with satisfaction) that someone so monstrously underqualified for the most powerful office in the world would reveal the depth of his ineptitude sooner or later, or that there’d be a hefty political price to pay for taking the solemn role of President of the United States so lightly, as if it were an extracurricular activity he could use on his college application.

And then terrorists attacked America, and it became George Bush’s world again. In the midst of the shock and the grief of September 11th, there was still one other sentiment on the lips of almost everyone I talked to: “…and this is the man we have to lead us through this?” Even as reviled mayor Rudolph Giuliani emerged as the man showing Bush and the world what leadership in a crisis is all about; even as Bush, in his few photo-op appearances, uttered barely a single unscripted word (except perhaps for “There’s a poster out West, it says ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’” — followed by an almost-audible round of exasperated forehead-slapping in the west wing); even amidst widespread unease about the massive retaliation Bush initially promised, the country lined up dutifully behind its president.

Which is as it should be, I suppose. Demolished buildings, 7,000 dead Americans, and murderous fanatics still at large, is serious — a lot more serious than whether the President has to backpedal on his promise not to touch Social Security funds. This is no time to be undermining the strength of the Oval Office.

And yet… my exhausted sense of outrage is crying feebly, “He’s doing it again.” He’s escaping judgment. He’s escaping even the discussion of judgment. Reagan may have been the Teflon president, to whom no accusation could stick; but Bush has gone him one better: like Keanu Reeves dodging bullets in The Matrix, nothing even touches him in the first place. History will probably forget that Bush ran the economy into the ground; it’ll record that a coordinated terrorist attack plunged the country into recession. No one’s interested now in asking Dick Cheney the tough questions about his energy policy — even though, if suspicions about oil executives dictating policy are true, it’s a gigantic abuse of the public trust. The Supreme Court didn’t murder 7,000 people in Bush v. Gore, but their figurative violence against the Constitution was comparable — and now it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever be made to answer for it.

What luck for Bush. And it may just be that sheer luck is what we need in a leader right now. That, and a certain reckless faith in the ability to coast through adversity. But unless he sheds some of his magical protective aura on the rest of us, I worry that we’ll start dropping bombs at the direction of a man who never learned that actions have consequences.

Three kinds of meat

Lunch today is a container with a little bit each of sweet-and-sour meatballs, shredded pork in tomato sauce, and sausage-and-vegetables from the hot-food bar at Mollie Stone’s. Just thought I’d mention that.

It’s a far cry from where I was in the mid-90’s, when I toyed with the idea of becoming a vegetarian. That began when my doctor advised eating less red meat, and around the same time Andrea berated me for ordering veal at a restaurant, citing the plight of veal calves. This led to a discussion of the strange hypocrisy of some people who avoid eating charismatic animals like cute little lambs but do eat animals with less personal charm, such as chickens. I wanted a more scientific way to cut out red meat (including veal, for Andrea’s sake) that didn’t remove all meat from my diet. I finally settled on a taxonomic “class” as the dividing line: mammals. Eating mammals bad; eating non-mammals OK.

I stuck to this for the better part of a year, and now look how far back I’ve slid.

Greatest hits: Toilet Bowl Hill

[Reproduced from e-mail, by request.]

This story takes place in the winter of 1977-78. I was in sixth grade and hung around a lot with my friends David and Sarah. One day after a heavy snow, the three of us felt like sledding. David said he knew of a cool sledding spot I’d never heard of before, called “Toilet Bowl Hill.” Off we went to a wooded spot near Sarah’s apartment.

When we arrived, I discovered that the spot was aptly named. We stood at the south edge of a circular depression. Kids were sledding down the east and west slopes into the “basin,” then trundling back up for another run.

When I suggested we march around to the east slope to do our sledding, David said no; he wanted to try “Dead Man’s Run.” David showed us the top of it, near where we were already standing. It was a narrow gully, like a bobsled track, that ran down the south slope, with trees very close on either side. No one was sledding there, and it was easy to see why. A sledder would quickly lose control in that narrow channel, which descended toward the basin much more steeply than either the east or the west slopes. It jagged back and forth slightly, and tree roots jutted into the path. The rider would certainly be thrown from the sled, into one of the trees or at least the brambly underbrush. Sarah and I said “No way!” but David wanted to give it a try, having heard legends of daring local kids who’d done it before.

Now, when you’re eleven years old and your friend volunteers to perform a crazy stunt, maybe you spend a few seconds trying to talk him out of it, but really what you want is to see him do it. So there was David, setting the sled down in the top of Dead Man’s Run, apprehensively gauging the course ahead. Sarah and I were filled with fear and excitement.

And then David’s grip on the sled slipped, and off it went without him!

For a second it was funny, and we accused David of chickening out and making it look like an accident; but as we watched the sled careen down the hill (getting knocked around mercilessly), horror began to dawn on us. You see, Toilet Bowl Hill has a sleddable east slope, a sleddable west slope, and a mostly impassable south slope, but it has no north slope — because that whole side is the Grand Central Parkway. Along the north side, nothing but a few short, widely spaced wooden posts separated the basin from lanes of speeding cars; and when the sled reached the bottom of Dead Man’s Run, it had tremendous speed — more than enough to allow it to cross the basin and sail out into highway traffic!

Time slowed down for me as I watched the inevitable unfold. There’d be a hideous wreck on the highway. People would be hurt, maybe killed. Worse: I’d be in a heap of trouble! I think my craven eleven-year-old mind was already plotting how to put it all on David. There: it crossed the basin and was still gliding along, slower than before but still at a good enough clip to exit onto the roadway.

And then a miracle happened. Against all odds, the sled banged into one of the few short wooden posts and came to an abrupt stop.

Sarah, David and I stood at the top of Dead Man’s Run for several long, silent seconds while contemplating the bullet we had just dodged. Then we trooped downhill to retrieve the sled. When we reached it, we were standing just a few feet from the shoulder of the road. We watched the cars speed safely by. Feeling much too somber, we left Toilet Bowl Hill without sledding at all.

Greatest hits: handing change

[Resurrected from my old, defunct website.]

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: when I pay for something and the clerk hands me change, and I’m handed bills first, then coins.

The best way I can think of to describe the problem is this: bills have to be manipulated with the fingers, and coins have to be held in the palm of the hand. Balancing the coins on top of the bills undermines both requirements. Before the bills can be folded and tucked into a pocket or a wallet, the coins have to be rolled off into the other hand. Sometimes the coins roll completely out of control, clattering onto the checkout counter or the floor.

If the clerk drops the coins into the palm instead, then places the bills on top, no second hand is required to stash the change. It’s easy to hold the coins in the palm while pinching the bills in half and tucking them into a shirt pocket, or into a wallet (which the other hand is now free to hold open). The same hand can then drop the coins into a pants pocket.

It seems perfectly obvious to me, and it’s all I can do not to give this lecture to every clerk who apparently hasn’t thought this through.

I am Ken lite

In yesterday’s blog post, Ken Jennings (yes, him again) reveals that in additional to everything else, he’s also a closet cartoonist. I’m a closet cartoonist!

Zoger the Vorton, episode 3, part 1, from my college newspaper, The Tartan

This brings the number of ways I’m like Ken to at least six:

We’re both software engineers;
We’re both published authors;
We’re both new(ish) dads;
We’re both e-mail quizmasters;
We’re both closet cartoonists; and
We were both in the Seattle area this week.

There are a couple of key areas in which we are not the same, such as the sizes of our respective audiences, and one of us having won millions of dollars on national TV. Although if you include the dot-com boom, we’ve both “won millions.” Now one of us has to catch up to the other by losing those millions back…

Happy birthday Star Trek

Star Trek is 40 today. Happy birthday, Star Trek! Yes, it’s longer than Alex has been around, and yes, like Alex, no one originally expected it to last anything like this long. But the similarities end there. Star Trek never curled happily by my feet or licked my face to cheer me up.

What can I say about Star Trek that hasn’t already been said many times before? Well, I do have a couple of cute personal stories from when I was a kid in the 70’s and Star Trek had not yet transformed into a cultural touchstone. (It was still the shameful secret love of closeted nerds everywhere.)

One dim memory from a summer at the Pine Knoll bungalow colony in Monticello: my friend Michael wanted to “play Star Trek,” which at that point I’d never seen. I was assigned the role of Scotty, who (Michael explained to me) kept the spaceship in working order. I got into character as best I could, complaining about broken gears and attempting to fix them, but was berated by Michael who said, “The Enterprise doesn’t have gears, it has dilithium crystals!”

A few years later, having by now seen plenty of Star Trek on TV (the original series and the animated one), my friend David and I were confirmed Trekkie nerds. My mom took us on a subway ride into Manhattan to visit a short-lived mecca for Trekkies called “The Federation Trading Post,” a store full of Trek memorabilia, which at that time was sparse and hard to find. The tiny store was itself hard to find! But once you did, you could buy phaser and communicator props, scripts of all 79 episodes and audio cassettes of some (not videocassettes — VCRs wouldn’t appear in average homes for a few more years), rubber Spock ears, all the James Blish books, etc. Most of the really cool things were not within our budget, but we did score The Starfleet Technical Manual, the Star Trek Blueprints, a couple of blank Trek-uniform shirts and the insignia patches and gold braiding to sew onto them. I got a gold “command department” shirt; David got a blue “science” one. Back at home, I asked my mom to sew on my insignia and braids, showing her the exact specifications (to the millimeter!) from the Star Trek Technical Manual. Bless her, she made it perfect. Thanks, Mom! For a short time thereafter, David and I instituted our own “Starfleet Academy” at which we would wear our “uniforms” and practice flipping each other and rolling to our feet á là Captain Kirk.

Of course I’ve long outgrown most of that, but to this day there is still a model of the Enterprise-A on my desk. It’s the most beautiful of all sci-fi spaceships.