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Here are some things that popped into my mind during the last few weeks of running. When you’re running for a couple of hours with no headphones, you get a lot of time to think about various topics. The problem is remembering them later.

• Sand and stones work their way into my socks and shoes while I am running, but they never work their way out.

  Someone should design socks with the fibers oriented upwards so that small objects that get into the socks get ratcheted out.

  Although… maybe the problems is that my leg hairs are oriented downward, and that ratchets objects down.

  Someone should conduct a study – do men with hairy ankles get more nuisance objects in their socks/shoes than men with shaved ankles?
  Secondary study – do women get fewer nuisance objects in their socks/shoes than men?
  Are there enough women with hairy ankles to conduct a third study?

• Track meet sprint events rely too much on reaction times for the overall times. Why do the runners have to wait for the gun to fire at some inconsistent time?

  I propose that the starter’s gun is replaced by something more predictable, like the red-red-red-green light sequence found in drag racing and Mario Kart. Then the start wouldn’t be so surprising. Do you want to award the fastest runner or the runner with the best reaction time?

• Subdivisions should have different signs for different entrances.

  It was disconcerting the first time this happened to me: I had been running for a while. I saw an entrance sign for a subdivision but didn’t think too much of it. I ran for another minute or two, saw the same sign, and wondered just how few steps I had taken during the last minute.

  Have different signs. Rather than two signs that each say “Briarwood Villas”, have a “Briarwood Villas East” and “Briarwood Villas West” or something. That way I know I have made progress.

• I know some schools don’t allow kids to wear Heelies, but I haven’t seen a race that has banned them.

  It would be fun to find a hilly course on smooth roads. Then you could sprint up a hill and coast down, sprint, coast, etc.

• If you see a guy running without a shirt, don’t assume he is trying to show off. Sure, there are some who are vain, but there are other guys who just have chafing issues.

  On that note, here’s a public service announcement: I have heard the 3M brand Nexcare (active, waterproof edition) bandages stick better than the Band-Aid brand Clear Spots.

• And speaking of shirts… if you are reading this and you are in charge of ordering shirts for a race, please consider the old-fashioned long-sleeved T-shirt of good quality. It used to be that the local 5Ks would give the runners cotton short-sleeved T-shirts, and longer races (e.g. marathons and half marathons) would hand out long-sleeved cotton T-shirts.

  Nowadays, every race hands out tech shirts, either long- or short-sleeved. The problem is that I have a dozen different shirts I can wear running, but only 2 or 3 that I can wear normally, going out and about like taking the kids to the zoo or going to the store or whenever you would normally wear a T-shirt.

  I suppose I could wear a tech shirt out and about, but it seems a bit ostentatious to me. Plus some of them use such a thin fabric. That may be great for competing, but not watching football or whatever.

  Race organizers: bring the pendulum back to the middle. Can some of you take the extra money you would have spent for tech fabric and just upgrade the quality of long-sleeve cotton shirt instead?

  Thanks.

I thought about writing something when Riley Cooper first made the news during the off-season. His name resurfaced in the news last week because of an altercation during practice, and I thought now might be a good time to write about it.

This piece is not to condemn or condone anything – just my explanation of how it happened. As a response to the people on the radio who were wondering “How can anyone in this day and age mess up so badly? I mean, everyone knows you just don’t say that.”

And to those of you who don’t know what’s going on, Riley Cooper is a player in the NFL. He is a white guy, and he went to a country-music concert and got somewhat intoxicated and got in trouble for yelling a bad word at a security guard, who is a black guy. The bad word in this case was a strong racial word. Mr. Cooper apologized for his speech and actions. End of synopsis.

I heard people wondering why he thought he could say that. Is he secretly racist? or was this just a slip-up?

I’m going to say he’s just a product of his culture.

The culture in this case is the NFL. It could apply to the NBA as well, but not the NHL (more on that later).

Let me use an analogy here. I’m going to use one even if you don’t let me.

Imagine you grow up in Michigan, then you move to Texas. Your accent is different from theirs. Theirs, of course, is funny, and you vow to yourself that you do not want to sound like them. So you make a conscious effort to avoid speaking like they do. You do fine for a few years, then one day when you are at a party with some of your Michigan friends, you let your guard down for one minute and some Texan-sounding speech slips out.

Does anyone blame you for sounding like a Texan? Or is it expected that, after a few years, you’ll have absorbed some of the culture around you?

That’s how I see the Riley Cooper incident. From my understanding, the black professional athletes toss around racist terms like candy at a parade. Only to each other, of course. A white guy like Cooper doesn’t participate in that, but it’s around him all the time – he is bound to hear that word every day. On the field, in the weight room, in the locker room.

Over the years, he has gradually absorbed some of that culture. Normally, he knows enough to restrain himself and not let that speech slip out. But it’s there in his subconscious. All it took was some alcohol to remove some of the restraint and bring the subconscious more to the forefront.

That’s my explanation. I’ll let other people debate the rightness and wrongness of the people involved.

I mentioned the NHL earlier, that an athlete there wouldn’t get into the trouble that Mr. Cooper did. Not because they are that much less racist, but because the culture is different. A white American on an NHL team is not going to slip up and offend a black American, but I bet he would offend a Russian or a Swede. Because any Russian (or Swedish, or whatever other language happens to be prevalent in that team/league) he learns will likely include some unsavory words.

With whom is a person spending his time? What do his ears hear all day? Don’t be surprised when his speech starts to match.

I took a few books on vacation this year. Some were for the kids to read and I wanted to read them first. I also brought Septimus Heap books 3 and 4, since I’ve read only 1 and 2. But I didn’t get to them. What I did read were these:

• Soup Ahoy
  One of the Soup series by Robert Newton Peck. This was my favorite of the series, and the first one I read. If I had known it would be my favorite, I would have read it last so that I could enjoy the others better.
• Soup
  The first of the Soup series by Robert Newton Peck. After I started reading this, I remembered parts of it and realized that I had read this back when I was about my son’s age. Still entertaining now though.
• Soup on Fire
  One of the Soup series by Robert Newton Peck. It was fine, but the plot was too similar to Soup Ahoy.
• A Squire’s Tale
  The first of the The Squire’s Tales series by Gerald Morris. I look forward to reading some of his The Knights’ Tales series next year, and then reading the rest of this series. I liked the characters he added, the extra magic, to the stories of the knights of Camelot. I recommend it for, say, 5th grade and up.
• White Fang
  The classic by Jack London. After reading newer books targeted for younger kids, I thought this one started out rather slowly. Page after page of descriptions of tundra. I wondered how tedious the book would be and if I would have the motivation to finish it on my vacation.

  It didn’t become a classic by being boring.

  The initial descriptions are there to set the stage. There is richness in the details. They help engage the reader, who must actually read the story and not just peruse it.

  I read it more quickly than I thought I would. Good book.

• A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Bad Beginning
  The first of the Lemony Snicket series. I thought I would read it to see if I wanted Alpha to read the series. I knew they were popular, so I started looking at it in the library. Alpha saw me holding it and mentioned that he was on book 3 of the series. So much for staying ahead of the curve. Apparently, they read the first two books in class last year (3rd grade).

  I checked the book out of the library anyway.

  I didn’t like it.

  Other than the mistreatment of children, which was correctly presented as something bad (think Oliver Twist), there was not much objectionable in this book. It was just not captivating. I think it seemed too gloomy or depressing, which Mr. Snicket did warn me about before I started reading. I just didn’t think it would be as bad as it was.

  Other books that I have tried, such as the Septimus Heap series or the Percy Jackson series or The Knights’ Tales series, have left me eager to read the subsequent books in the series. Lemony Snicket did not.

  If you’re wondering for a series to read and you’ve exhausted all other options, maybe try it. Alpha can read the rest of the series if he wants, but he’s on his own.

That was it for this summer – 6 books. Time to start planning for next year.

It’s September, the start of the fall quarter. Time for me to update the theme on this blog. Around here, the end of summer means the start of football.

As is usual, it’s not much of a new theme – all I did was replace the images.
Anyway, here’s a slightly new look.

I hope it doesn’t mislead any people, because this blog is mostly about things that aren’t football. There may be football items from time to time. And that’s real football, not soccer.

Transcript:

Flashing police lights seen in a rearview mirror
Driver: Let’s hear what the nice police officer has to tell us
Police: You, in the Buick, pull over!
Driver: No!
Police: No?! I wasn’t asking. I said pull over!
Driver: No!
Mr. Rogers: It’s a cardigan.

A metric that has been gaining attention lately is Yards Per Point (YPP).

What good is a metric if not for ranking things?

And what good are rankings but to tell you who is better?

And how do you truly know which teams are better except for when they play each other?

Thus, I have incorporated YPP into my list of football team rankings. Really, though, it’s not rankings so much as it is an attempt at predicting winners (moneyline. I have yet to incorporate spreads).

We can know how good a metric is by using it to predict winners and then comparing the actual winners.

YPP is not all that impressive.

It’s better than randomly picking a team, but not as good as most of the other metrics.

Go view YPP values and results for the years 2006-present.

My high school class reunion was this past weekend.

I didn’t go, mainly because I wasn’t invited.

I happened to be talking to a classmate’s mom a couple of weeks before the event and that’s how I learned they were having the event.

We already had a busy weekend planned by then, so it wouldn’t have worked.

But I figured out why they couldn’t find me:

I’m not on Facebook.

Never mind that my parents have been in the same house for the last 43 years.

Never mind that my brother is an administrator at our high school and they contacted him about scheduling a tour of the new building.

Never mind that you can type my name into a search engine and get my contact information.

Since my name is not in Facebook, I don’t exist.

I hope I don’t sound bitter, because I’m not – I’m rather amused by it.

I suppose Facebook makes life easier for reunion organizers. But does it also make them lazier?

Of course, I know the various ways to contact me, so it’s easy to rattle them off. And they might not know the connections.

Still, it’s fun to speculate how, in the year 2013, someone can remain uncontactable.

I mean, they could have at least checked my Classmates.com account…