8.3.2023 – was an actual need

was an actual need
bigger, bigger, bigger, best?
wasn’t that at all

When I was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1970’s, fall afternoons meant football.

Michigan football.

University of Michigan football.

It was hard to miss.

My Dad was into what was called Hi-Fi or High Fidelity sound systems and he had wired our whole house and with a click of a button, his sound system would play in any room, or as he liked it, all of the rooms of the house.

Just before noon on Saturday’s he would tune into WUOM Ann Arbor in time to hear the words, “The Wolverines are on the air” and then the deep bass of the voice of Michigan Football (for UOM listeners) Tom Hemingway would welcome us either to Ann Arbor or West Lafayette, Indiana or Champaign, Illinois or wherever Michigan was playing that day and the broadcast of the game would be the backdrop to another fall weekend afternoon.

Every week.

The format of the broadcast more or less got embedded into your subconscious and when game breaks were made, the same breaks used year after year, you could recite them along with the broadcast.

One game break always came at the end of the 3rd quarter.

“Highlight films of todays game” it would start, “will be available this …” and a list of the locations and times across the state where fans could go and watch FILMS … 16mm movies of the latest game.

My memory says that Grand Rapids fans could go the University Club at Noon on Thursdays.

I never knew anyone who went to see these films but that was what fans had to do to WATCH the Wolverines.

Unless, by chance, the game was TV.

Back then there was only one or two college football games on any Saturday.

Televised games were seen as so powerful a recruiting tool that every team was limited to just two appearances a year with an extra game every other year so no team could be on more than 5 times in two years.

If you wanted to see the Wolverines on a weekly basis, it was game films.

It was game films, OR, you went to see the game.

There was time when going to see a Michigan Football game, or any professional athletic team or concert was all about the event.

Over 100,000 people would pack themselves into Michigan Stadium to do one thing.

Watch a football game.

100,000 and everyone, for the most part, focused on what was going down on the field.

Talk about unity.

Talk about one out of many.

Talk about a shared community experience.

One of my college roommate’s was from Ann Arbor and his folks had a set of 4 seasons tickets and in the years after college, I would often get a call and be invited to a game.

One year, due to wedding, my buddy’s folks couldn’t go to a game and the tickets were offered to me and my wife.

It was the 1991 Michigan – Notre Dame game.

As an aside, we got to our seats and I greeted most of the fans sitting around us.

My wife asked, ‘How do you know all these people?’

I told her that these were seats that Scott’s (my roommate) Parents had for 20 years and everyone who sat there knew everyone.

I then added, ” … and they know if you are NOT supposed to sit here.”

A guy in front of us turned around and caught my wife’s eye and with a big smile, nodded a very firm agreement.

This was the game that is known for a 4th quarter touchdown catch that won Desmond Howard the Heisman Trophy.

One play that won the most valuable player of the YEAR award?

One play in the first game of the year that won the most valuable player of the YEAR award?

YUP!

And I can see it like it was yesterday.

Up 17-14 late in the 4th QTR with 4th down and ONE FOOT at the ND 25, Michigan went for it.

This alone brought 110,000 people to their feet.

Quarterback Elvis Grbac dropped back to pass and looked right, cocked his arm, the crowd held its breath … and pulled his arm down.

The crowd exhaled, thinking the pass play was gone, but maybe maybe maybe, Elvis might fall over and get one foot for the 1st down.

Then Grbac half turned and leaned over so far backwards he almost fell and threw the ball hard and high.

And the crowd again sucked in all the air in Michigan Stadium.

The disappoint of Michigan fans rippled through the crowd like a wave that broke against the jubilation of any ND fan in the crowd.

With the ball in the air going towards no one and no where but the empty corner of the end zone, there was blur along the right sideline.

Like a genie out of a bottle or the sudden appearance of a ghost, teeny tiny #21, Desmond Howard flew and I mean flew, and I mean from the 15 yard line to the corner of the end zone, little Desmond FLEW, parallel to the astro turf surface, flew, never more then 3 feet off the ground.

Now there was no oxygen in that stadium.

Time stopped.

It was like those flashback scenes in a movie where what I saw was like still pictures played in fast succession instead of real life in real time.

The stadium, 110,000 people, for a split second went silent.

The blur that was little Desmond met up the football and he caught the ball with both hands, hugged to his body and fell into the end zone.

And that place exploded!

Everyone as one, focused on that one single second, that moment in time, all part of one collective thought.

Pandemonium, as the papers would report, ensued.

There was no waiting for a review.

There was no need for any other decision by a ref other than TOUCHDOWN.

There was no replay in the stadium.

My memory tells me that is how it happened and that is good enough for me.

The game day experience.

What, really, WHAT could be better than that?

30 Years later, Michigan has the answer.

Bigger, better TV scoreboards in the Stadium.

According to a story in the Detroit Free Press, Michigan is putting the final touches on what will be the 3rd largest scoreboards in the country.

Oh Boy!

According to the story, “This wasn’t ‘how do we spend more money, how do we go bigger, bigger, bigger,’ it wasn’t that at all.”

It was this paragraph that gave me pause.

As for the function of the boards, the plan is to use the additional space to have more in-depth stats available to fans during games, as well as show other games’ scores more consistently, to compete with the at-home experience.

This was done, the giant scoreboards, to compete with the at-home experience.

Big College Sports on the Big Stage in the Biggest Stadium needs the BIGGEST scoreboards to compete with the at-home experience.

The story goes on, “We’re really trying to prioritize what’s done for the fans,” said Jake Stocker, U-M’s director of game presentation and fan experience. “Using this new technology to make it a better fan experience, knowing that people can’t always connect to their cell phones at Michigan Stadium, so we’re giving them that experience.”

Michigan has a Director of Game Presentation and Fan Experience?

I guess they do and he said “Using this new technology to make it a better fan experience, knowing that people can’t always connect to their cell phones at Michigan Stadium.”

Isn’t there anyplace, ANYPLACE on EARTH, where the ability to connect to a cell phone takes the 2nd seat?

Certainly not at a college football game.

To me, for the Leaders and Best, bigger bigger bigger, doesn’t add up to best.

The game I went to in 1991 had over 100,000 focused on one thing.

Today, the Director of Game Presentation and Fan Experience wants you to be at Michigan Stadium and fell like you never left home.

Really.

Then why leave home?

To paraphrase George C Scott in the movie Patton, “God, how I hate the 21st Century.“

8.2.2023 – harmless novelties

harmless novelties
innocence, before death march
of progress gathered

What else could we be talking about but self-checkout at the store.

As Adrian Chiles wrote in his article, Want a glimpse of dystopia? Visit the self-service checkouts:

Back then there were about two dozen staffed checkouts, in those days of innocence before the death march of progress gathered pace.

A handful of self-checkouts appeared; a handful of human ones vanished. At first we saw them as harmless novelties.

They were never all in operation, and those that were rarely worked properly.

I used to bet my kids that I could get any one or two items from Walmart in under 5 minutes.

The secret was moving fast and the little used self check out lanes.

My wife would say she needed milk or one of the kids needed a poster board or a glue stick for a school project and the game was afoot.

I would drive to the Walmart and park near the garden section and enter a back door and sweep round inside in a wide circle to the correct department, grab my item, hit that self checkout with debit card in hand and be out the door, always under 5 minutes.

The kids got into it as well and would run along with me.

Once my daughter D’asia said she would get the check out all set for me and ran on ahead and pressed the touch screen to start the process.

I got there to scan the item in question and the machine, in computer voice said, “presione completar compra”.

I looked down to see a screen I didn’t recognize.

D’asia had pressed the button to continue the transaction in Spanish.

I was lost.

I looked at Daddles and she just shrugged.

I took a chance and pressed a few more buttons.

Whatever the buttons said, they set off a beeping that got the attention of a human being.

The human being in the form of a Walmart Sales person who wanted to turn the beeping off but all the prompts were in Spanish.

We were both hopelessly helpless or helplessly hopeless in the face of bilingual computer voiced madness.

Together we got the machine to cooperate but the sales person looked at my daughter with one finger pointing at her and said, “DON’T DO THAT AGAIN.”

Took us about 15 minutes.

As Mr. Chiles writes:

“… the remainder invariably had a glitch in store for you.

Only the other day I had a torrid time with some pitiful, dried-out geraniums on a three-for-£5 offer.

They just wouldn’t scan.

I got them for nothing in the end, but they all died anyway.

Why does that last line make me think of a coming epitaph for us all in so many ways.

I got them for nothing in the end.

But they all died anyway.

Dystopian indeed.

.

8.1.2023 – trying to unweave

trying to unweave
unwind piece together
past and the future

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,

From The Dry Salvages in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943

7.31.2023 – sand is a substance

sand is a substance
beautiful mysterious
each grain on a beach

… the materials of the beach are themselves steeped in antiquity. Sand is a substance that is beautiful, mysterious, and infinitely variable; each grain on a beach is the result of processes that go back into the shadowy beginnings of life, or of the earth itself.

The bulk of seashore sand is derived from the weathering and decay of rocks, transported from their place of origin to the sea by the rains and the rivers. In the unhurried processes of erosion, in the freighting seaward, in the interruptions and resumptions of that journey, the minerals have suffered various fates—some have been dropped, some have worn out and vanished. In the mountains the slow decay and disintegration of the rocks proceed, and the stream of sediments grows—suddenly and dramatically by rockslides—slowly, inexorably, by the wearing of rock by water. All begin their passage toward the sea. Some disappear through the solvent action of water or by grinding attrition in the rapids of a river’s bed. Some are dropped on the riverbank by flood waters, there to lie for a hundred, a thousand years, to become locked in the sediments of the plain and wait another million years or so, during which, perhaps, the sea comes in and then returns to its basin. Then at last they are released by the persistent work of erosion’s tools—wind, rain, and frost—to resume the journey to the sea. Once brought to salt water, a fresh rearranging, sorting, and transport begin. Light minerals, like flakes of mica, are carried away almost at once; heavy ones like the black sands of ilmenite and rutile are picked up by the violence of storm waves and thrown on the upper beach.

No individual sand grain remains long in any one place. The smaller it is, the more it is subject to long transport—the larger grains by water, the smaller by wind. An average grain of sand is only two and one half times the weight of an equal volume of water, but more than two thousand times as heavy as air, so only the smaller grains are available for transport by wind. But despite the constant working over of the sands by wind and water, a beach shows little visible change from day to day, for as one grain is carried away, another is usually brought to take its place

From The Rim of Sand in the book, The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1955).

Ms. Carson may be better known for the book, Silent Spring, but I like the Edge of the Sea better.

Maybe because that it is where I work.

I can leave my office at lunch time and in 5 minutes stand with my feet in the water and Mr. Thoreau said of Cape Code, “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.“

7.30.2023 – millionaire is but

millionaire is but
the average dishwasher
dressed in a new suit

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear.

It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men.

But in reality there is no such difference.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

From Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. (First published by Victor Gollancz 1933.)

Mr. Orwell opens his book with the epigram from Chaucer.

O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!

I am reminded as well as warned, “Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him” from the James 2:5 (NIV)